WISDOM FROM A MODERATE MUSLIM

Jake Nichols of the Planet Jackson Hole rag has conducted an interview of some vital interest and intensity. From his insider understanding of the terrorist mentality, Dr. Tawfik Hamid predicted the destruction of the Twin Towers (9-11), Madrid bombings, and London attacks. Now his stated mission has become to speak out against radical Islam as a cancer that is spreading with frightening rapidity across the globe today. A courageous as well as scholarly initiator of Islamic reformation, Dr. Hamid seeks to build new thinking within Islam to overcome the hatred and violent extremism that have metastasized within his religious tradition as he states: "in order to make LOVE prevail you should defeat Hatred!"

Read on...

Jackson Hole, WY - Dr. Tawfik Hamid, 47, was born in Egypt to an agnostic father and liberal French mother. As a student at Cairo University medical school in the late 1970s, Dr. Hamid joined a radical Islamic group and became, in essence, a budding terrorist.

He has since eschewed violent teachings of the Qur’an and other Islamic texts and has embraced a new and more peaceful interpretation of the Muslim faith which he has developed and encouraged by authoring several books and lecturing worldwide. Dr. Hamid believes changing the Muslim religion from within is the only way to ensure world peace.

“It is the only hope to a long term solution to the problem and not just a recipe approach or a symptomatic treatment for the disease,” the doctor told the Planet during a phone interview from Washington, D.C. “I want to treat the disease from its roots so that we guarantee that it does not come again in the future.”

While Dr. Hamid preaches a peaceful interpretation of the Qur’an, his suggestions for dealing with radical Islamists have been accused of pouring gasoline on the fire. He often defends his position by saying the western world and America is too worried about seeming “Islamaphobic.”

“Stop asking what you have done wrong. Stop it!” he said. “They’re slaughtering you like sheep and you still look within. You criticize your history, your institutions, your churches. Why can’t you realize that it has nothing to do with what you have done but with what they want?”

Planet Jackson Hole: You claim you were approached in college by the man who is now considered Bin Laden’s lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahiri. He got you involved in a rather radical Muslim group called Jamaat Islamiyah. Describe the process.

Dr. Tawfik Hamid: It was a group inside the medical school itself and it was legal back then. We used to have three masques: One relatively peaceful, another a bit more aggressive, and Jamaat Islamiyah. Approximately 3 percent of the students at the school were members of Jamaat Islamiyah. You go to pray with them. They put your name on some sort of list. You sign and are considered a member. It was a group that prepared you, indoctrinated you, with the violent teachings.

PJH: The indoctrination process has been likened to a “brainwashing.” You, yourself, have detailed stages—Stage I: creating hatred toward non-believers; Stage II: eliminating empathy or sympathy toward the pain and suffering of others; Stage III: accepting or using violence against others. How far did they suck you in … and how?

TH: When you are motivated by religious beliefs [they] can be used by some people to suppress your ability to do critical thinking. They did this to me by using certain verses and certain tactics. For example, they liked to use a phrase, ‘If you think, you become an infidel.’ So they use tactics that make it difficult for you to question or think. They say to you, ‘This is the will of Allah. You cannot negotiate with God and you have to just obey blindly whatever he says to you.’

PJH: And the process is subtle?

TH: The process is gradual. One day I prayed with them and they asked us to stand in queues with no separation or gaps in between our shoulders and our feet. This was intentionally done to make us feel as if we were at war. To quote the Qur’anic verse: “God loves those who fight for his cause as if they are one cemented or solid structure with no gaps between them.”

So they put you in the Jihadi mind. You start to feel like you are a soldier, not just someone who is worshipping God. You are a part of a system that is declaring war on non-believers or infidels. In fact, they use the power of hellfire very effectively. The Qur’an describes the hellfire in very poetic and powerful [imagery], with great detail in the torture tactics.

PJH: And I have never heard anyone but you mention this, but there is the use of sexual deprivation on young recruits, adolescent males, at a time in their lives when their bodies are raging with testosterone.

TH: Many students are unable to have any sexual relationships because marriage was very costly and very difficult while they are students. Extramarital relationships are very difficult in this culture and strongly prohibited. So, on one hand you have this sexual frustration, on the other hand you have a description of paradise full of ladies and women waiting for you there. This creates some distortion in our minds and many of the students back then were truly dreaming about going to paradise; dying for Allah as a martyr or shahid, and go to paradise to have these ladies up there.

PJH: How does this apply to women suicide bombers, who are now starting to become more prevalent, where you used to never hear of such a thing? What are they promised, Chippendales and fat-free ice cream?

TH: Look, the dream of going to God and the paradise and to die in martyrdom or shahid is actually in the mind of many women including my wife. She used to dream about dying as a martyr to go to paradise.

But the dream for women is a little different. Women are affected by the fear of hell more than desire in having sexual things in paradise. There are words of the prophet Mohammed which are not Qur’anic but are generally accepted by most Muslims, that says most of the people in hell are women. The women are generally afraid of going to hell because the torture tactics are clearly described in the Qur’an.

PJH: But you got out. You are not hiding in a cave with al-Zawahiri. You are here in the U.S. and a devotee of a kinder Islam.

TH: I reached that level [Stage III] and what happened was a certain event. There was a big party in the medical school. It was an innocent party but the Jamaat Islamiyah saw it as un-Islamic, so they gathered in the hundreds, more than a thousand, actually, and they prayed in the middle of the school showing power and chanting, ‘Allahu Akbar,’ and threatening to stop this innocent party by violence. On this day, I was standing beside someone who was the leader of the fourth group of the Jamaat Islamiyah and he was planning with other people to kidnap one of the police officers and bury him alive. To dig a grave beside the mosque and bury the man alive.

And I just thought this was too much for me. It awakened my conscious and I felt there was something fundamentally wrong here and I started to think, which was the opposite of what they told me. And when I started to think, the whole process started backwards and I started to develop a new interpretation for the Qur’an and the Islamic teaching. This was the triggering factor. I found some Qur’anic verses that encouraged me to tell the truth even if it was against my culture.

PJH: You have described al-Zawahiri as a fiercest speaker you have ever heard.

TH: He is a man of great conviction. There is no doubt he believed in what he was saying. He was not doing it to gain money or wealth—he was from a relatively wealthy family. He was a very intelligent person. He had a great future in Egypt if he continued in the Arab world as a doctor.

It’s like Bin Laden, who was a billionaire and left everything to go to live in the mountains of Afghanistan. He left a five-star hotel to live there. So these people are truly convinced in what they are doing. Plus, if they have that charisma, like al-Zawahiri, he can just blow you away and you feel that you are totally captivated by his form of teachings that are very, very inflammatory and very powerful at the same time.

PJH: If we locked the both of you in a room...

TH: [Chuckles]

PJH: … and waited to see whose interpretation of the Qur’an would prevail, what would happen? Who would convince who?

TH: I will tell you, my views can be very convincing but his views are supported by a lot of other scholars and, also, he would use violence against me. So for me to use convincing here would not be very … well, let’s say, I would try to convince him and he would try to kill me.

PJH: Which leads me to some of the more controversial aspects of your lectures, Doctor. You have said HAMAS must be crushed militarily. Economic pressure must be forced on Saudi Arabia. You encourage western civilization to meet terrorists’ violence with violence. Would that be a fair assessment?

TH: With MORE violence, sometimes.

We have a recent example in history with the Nazis and the Emperor of Japan. We couldn’t change the ideology of the Nazis or the Japanese by peace or love or harmony or mutual understanding. The change in their educational system and their ideology happened only after their military defeat. You give your enemy a powerful military defeat, then you will be able to change their education.

This is what I’m suggesting here with HAMAS. The problem with Israel, for example, is they use what I call ‘a moderate dose of antibiotics’ which does not kill the infection, it just gives the wrong impression that the antibiotics are not working. What I’m saying is if you are going to use power in the military against the violence of barbarians like this, then you have to use sufficient power to suppress them. As long as you are using this moderate dose of power, the problem will remain a chronic problem. This might be viewed as very aggressive but, unfortunately, this is what history teaches us. In [the cases of] Hitler and Japan, the world used sufficient power to devastate them and the war was ended and peace happened after that. It was not peace with Hitler and Japan that brought peace. It was military power.

PJH: A little peace upside their head, eh?

TH: But it has to be devastating. It cannot be moderate military power; otherwise the war can continue forever.

PJH: And in the case of Saudi Arabia, it doesn’t help that, as a nation, we’re hooked on their oil.

TH: Of course. It’s a waste of your time if you try to use military might. What is needed is some type of economic pressure to push them toward modality. I’m not an advocate of sudden change of structure of the system there. Some people advocate immediate democracy or the changing of the government’s mind. My belief is this can create chaos like what’s happening in Iraq.

I believe it would be more wise to use their political leaders, some of whom are relatively pro-American, and cooperate with them and give them expertise and assist them in some way or another and work together to defeat radical Islam, which is also a threat to them. It’s like a chess match—one step at a time. Creating democracy now, before defeating radical Islam, can just invite an Islam which can cause more trouble for the world.

PJH: On Glenn Beck’s television show, you got into it a little bit with CAIR’s (Council on American-Islamic Relations) Ahmed Bedier. What happened there?

TH: It’s something we all need to recognize. You cannot call a person a moderate if he believes he should kill apostates or he allows the beating of women and stoning them to death, or allows slavery to come back again, or uses war against non-Muslims to subjugate them to Islam, or calls Jews “pigs and monkeys.” You can’t consider this a moderate person or organization.

What I am trying to do is propose a real treatment to the problem. To provide a new or alternative interpretation to the Islamic text which is feasible because the Arabic language is very flexible; you can interpret at the literal level or even metaphoric level.

PJH: You have a unique, insider’s understanding of the jihadist, the terrorist. You say you knew America would be hit two years before the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001. You saw it coming.

TH: As a simple observer, I saw the growth of Islamism and the violence and I could tell, at the end of this curve, they will start attacking in the West. It was obvious. They declared war against the western civilization and their freedoms, especially the freedom of women, and they hated to their guts any sort of liberal values.

I knew this cancer was growing and it was sure to hit the west but where to hit? You have, in the Arab culture, a proverb that means, “It is better to attack the most powerful, so that the weaker ones become afraid of you.” So they chose America because it’s the most powerful country.

Now, why New York City? Because, based on a Qur’an verse that says, “Whatever they do to tease the infidels or cause them pain, they will be rewarded by Allah for this.” So they chose New York City because they believed it would cause maximum pain to America because it is the capital of money and the symbolism of the twin towers would be most damaging.

PJH: Do salafist or fundamentalist Islam and radical Islam have to mean the same thing?

TH: A fundamentalist is someone who doesn’t want to shake hands with women. He will force his wife and daughter to wear the hijab. They don’t allow TV in their homes. It’s more within. The effect of it is within. Radical Islam is outside. It’s forcing others to believe. It’s using violence against Christians in order to subjugate them to Islam. They are really two faces to the same coin.

PJH: It sounds like a radical is a fundamentalist who takes up jihad.

TH: Yeah.

PJH: Let’s talk about how your views apply to our current political scene and the race for presidency. Barack Obama, for instance, has made no bones about how he would seek face-to-face meetings with leaders in the Arab world that we have struggled with. Will that be effective?

TH: That will never work. In fact, it will actually aggravate the problem. I’ll give you an example. In the cartoon [depiction] of the prophet Mohammed, for example. When the cartoon was published, it was the 30th of September, 2005. Until four months later, January 2006, there were no violent demonstrations, okay? On the day when the Danish magazine [Jyllands-Posten] apologized—this was the 30th of January, 2006—within 48 hours, violent demonstrations erupted throughout the world.

That is the phenomenon; that you show weakness and withdrawal with these people and they actually think of attacking you more. They attacked you in Kenya and Tanzania on your embassies in 1998. Your reaction was weak. This weakness encouraged them to attack you again.

So in trying to negotiate with the jihadists or radicals without losing your freedom is [impossible]. [Both] al-Zawahiri and Bin Laden said to you, “Convert to Islam or we will declare war on you.” This is a simple, clear issue that has been stated by the leaders of al-Qaida and has been repeated over and over. So why don’t you believe them? It is crystal clear; they are not ready to negotiate. They just want your submission.

[Obama] might be interested to negotiate but they are not. And you cannot negotiate with yourself. It’s just dreams. And I can see some people in the political field, especially, in my view, some of the liberal left; they live in dreams rather than reality. This approach, these politicians, I believe, will just bring more catastrophes to the world.

SADDAM GONE, NOW WHAT?

So another vicious dictator bites the dust. Few people realize that the Baath Party headed up by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, was actually formed upon the principles and organizational structure of the Nazi party. Iraq, because of its oil and hatred of Jews, was an important battleground between the Axis and Allied powers in World War II.

Nazi propaganda was broadcast throughout Baghdad, and Iraqis often went on rampages against Jews throughout the war. One of the most ardent Nazi supporters during WWII was named Khairallah Talfah. Talfah was Saddam's uncle. After the war, many of the key Iraqi Nazi supporters, all of whom evaded prosecution, wound up involved in Saddam's rise to power. This special examines the key individuals of the Iraqi-Nazi connection, the little-known battle for Iraq in WWII, and the strange link to Saddam Hussein.

Let me state again for those who haven't followed my foreign policy murmurings with keen attention to detail—I was vigorously against both the original invasion of Iraq by American forces in 1990, and even more adamantly so, again in 2003. But eventually, I too, reluctantly acquiesced to the idea that after getting ourselves into this mess, as honorable stewards of the peace, we should be equally committed to rectifying the situation as opposed to abandoning Iraq to its own devices.

My patriotic duty as a free-thinking citizen has never been easy, cut and dried, or rubber stamped by any political prize fight or dog tag. I am a self-confessed news junkie. I soak up every break neck opinion I can find, and of course, this approach not only makes my task of informed patriotism more difficult, it makes my task nearly impossible. In these particular times when the country is nearly evenly divided, yes, polarized, listening to partial truths tortured and hair-split bu so-called pundits who usually are no more than well-paid shamans spinning spells that everyone can detect as ridiculous but few will ever reject as the norm.

The history of politics shows us all too often how the politics of history is nothing short of a shameful game sold to the public as the reality of inclusiveness.

So during this phase of inner struggle in trying to nail down my own position on Iraq, what I required was my own sense of clarity, separate from any preconceived notions of who deserved to declare what brand of victory in an overwrought war where democracy as we know it will not be shown to grow on the sandy soils and rock cliffs of hardened tribal and religious differences just because a few dancing neo-cons happen to think Tom Paine and Tom Jefferson were decent fellows with a right good idea, and wouldn't it be great if we could invent a little friend, a sidekick really, in the Greater Middle East to help bring financial stability, fledgling peace, and of course, let's not forget to keep that black gold flowing at a fair price too, without all this other unimportant religious nonsense getting in the way...

Which distilled as usual to my biggest complaint. My biggest complaint this time is that as usual (since WWII), the American invaders—let's not be coy—were not truly fighting to win, but were instead warring by ridiculous rules of engagement that left our troops with a distinct disadvantage. It seemed as if we were merely babysitting the Iraqi commoner, bribing the Iraqi elite with promises and booty, hpoing to win, show or place in some unfounded popularity contest to win "hearts and minds" while losing many or as few lives and much treasure as the American taxpayer can squeeze out of a consumer economy for the pleasure of doing so.

Bottom line. Why START a war if you're not PREPARED to FIGHT? And this lapse in strategy wasn't all Rumsfeld's fault. The West clearly has no stomach for war. And the enemy is observing this and preparing for their strategies to meet THEIR needs until it is their time to strike. The enemy is learning that we just don't like to fight back. And we call them cowards.

Yes, the Bush objectives shifted with the sand dunes. No weapons of mass destruction found. So America gritted its teeth while the President squinted and declared that it was a good thing to hunt for and knock off this vicious dictator and murderer of his own people, Saddam Hussein. Even though I never muttered the thought publically, I must admit that it had crossed my mind that this man of affectations and airs many despots tend to adopt, might have been just the iron rod Iraq needed to keep the peace there. After all, hadn't we all seen photos of a shorter toothed Don Rumsfeld shaking hands with this same dictator. Didn't the US sell Hussein arms, even the chemicals he used to make his chemical weapons he fired on Iran in his war with them, a war that cost millions of lives and ended in a stalemate after ten years?



What is American friendship worth these days? Of course, now that the Iraqi despot has finally smoked his last cigar, Saddam apologists are crawling out of the woodwork.

But after watching the History Channel's program last night on Hussein and his Ba'ath party's connection to Hitler and the Nazis in WWII, I was completely transformed in my opinion. Assessing the Kurd situation properly, it is clear that there was no reason on earth to spare Hussein. Would I, as an American, have initiated a war with Iraq to simply depose the ruthless Saddam Hussein—no! Once in a war I can not escape, having captured him, would I have convicted him for crimes against humanity and sentenced him to death—absolutely.

Is America safer without Hussein? Probably not. Is Israel safer without Hussein? Probably. Hussein was a cold, reckoning, secular fascist with nationalist and regionalist aspirations, who sometimes it is said fancied himself as the second coming of ancient Babylonian King Nebucannezar. He wanted to control ALL of the Middle East in building the new Arab man. If that was all he wanted to do, we might could have lived with him, just as we have lived with and even supported many other cruel regimes. Saddam had several consolidating wars yet to fight to strengthen and lengthen his powers but Israel, and America's defense of her, would have become factors soon enough. While many may believe that Hussein might have achieved his Arab objectives without bothering the West or Israel, I suspect that inciting global anxiety and puppeteering the destabilization of world markets, particularly oil, would have been a weapon in his arsenal he would have certainly threatened and eventually used to thwart interceders like American or Great Britain, if he'd been given the chance. He more than likely would have taken out Israel first as a short-cut to fighting those other wars with the Saudis, or Iranians, depending on the anti-Israel sentiment to annoint his consolidated new role as kingpin of the entire New Middle East.

Meanwhile, the Saudis, continue to be the covert threat they've always been in funding Wahhabi mosques and university halls for Muslim studies all over American and the West, while maintaining a ruthless culture of religious intolerance on their own soil, also buy up politicians on both sides of the aisle and media outlets of every stripe to further their stealth invasion of the West. Wahhabism is a particularly militant form of Sunnism, and is being taught to Muslim children across the globe.

Yet American leaders still insist in calling the Saudis, friends of America.

As hardcore Sunnis the Saudis fear the hardcore Iranian Shi'ites, who as we all know are probably closer to nuclearization than any of us would hope. As greedy overlords the Saudis are in danger of overthrow from within their own sect, as Osama bin Laden has been quite critical of Saudi royals in the past. Saudi Arabia when not raiding Africa for slaves, imports most of its workers from around the Muslim region and elsewhere while the bulk of its own citizens live a life of gaudy elitism, and thus they would prefer to toss back a handful of their billions of petrodollars to have American troops face down Iran, to have America do the Saudi's own dirty work.

So as my president makes plands to announce his own new approach to the Iraq crisis, here is my updated position on Iraq. We should seriously consider leaving Iraq. We have failed in our objectives. The exploratory police action is finished. No weapons of mass destruction found. No democracy to be had, despite any number of purple fingers waved back at us. America must either fight like soldiers and not peacekeepers and American forces must leave this land to its own civil strife. No real news there, right? Leftists have been shouting this from day one. However, I now believe that the war is coming here to American shores. Bush and company even stated something along these lines years ago, so let's get prepared here, street by street. We as a nation are not in fighting form. We are in breach. This is an outrage to our heritage and our future.

As our leadership continues to waffle on security, shuffling its feet while ignoring the American people's sustained call for a revamped immigration policy, more and more of us are becoming painfully aware of what the US, Europe, India, and scattered other global fronts are facing with this "moderate" Muslim menace, which when observed with an informed clear mind unclouded by misplaced empathy and grotesque paternalism is nothing less than watching the relentless passive-aggressive trojan horse that will one day shriek out its war cry sealing its name—Islam—which of course does not mean peace, but is translated, submission, like the bloody beast it is.

I am not alone in fearing that America will wait until we lose a city or two on our own shores before we muster up the courage to wage all out war against this most vicious and untraditional enemy.

IF EUROPE HATES ITSELF

The optimism as regards the victory of the European element, which Arnold Toynbee was still able to uphold at the beginning of the sixties, looks strangely outdated today. “Of the 28 cultures we have identified…18 are dead and nine out of the ten remaining—in fact all except our own—show that they are already mortally wounded.” Who would still repeat these words today? And in general, what is our culture, what’s left of it? Is the civilization of technique and commerce spread victoriously throughout the world actually European culture? Or was this not perhaps rather born, in a post-European way, from the end of the ancient European cultures? I see here a paradoxical synchrony.

The victory of the techno-secular post-European world; with the universalization of its model of life and of its way of thinking, is linked throughout the world, but especially in the strictly non-European worlds of Asia and Africa, to the impression that Europe’s world of values, its culture and its faith, that on which its identity is based, has reached the end and has actually already left the stage, that now the hour of other worlds’ values has arrived, of pre-Colombian America, of Islam, of Asian mysticism.

Europe, precisely in this its hour of maximum success, seems to have become empty inside, paralyzed in a certain sense by a crisis in its circulatory system, a crisis that puts its life at risk, resorting, as it were, to transplants that cannot but eliminate its identity. To this interior failure of its fundamental spiritual powers corresponds the fact that, even ethnically, Europe appears to be on the way out.

There is a strange lack of desire for a future. Children, who are the future, are seen as a threat for the present; the idea is that they take something away from our life. They are not felt as a hope, but rather as a limitation of the present. We are forced to make comparisons with the Roman Empire at the time of its decline: it still worked as a great historical framework, but in practice it was already living off those who would dissolve it, since it had no more vital energy.

With this point we have reached the problems of the present day. As regards the possible future of Europe, there are two opposite diagnoses. On one hand there is the thesis of Oswald Spengler, who believed he could define a kind of natural law for the great cultural expressions: there is a moment of birth, the gradual growth, the flourishing of a culture, then the on-come of weariness, old age and death. Spengler embroiders his thesis impressively, with documentation taken from the history of cultures, in which this law of natural evolution can be discerned.

His thesis was that the West had reached its final epoch, which is moving inexorably towards the death of this cultural continent, despite all efforts to avert it. This thesis, labelled as biologistic, found ardent opponents in the period between the two world wars, especially in Catholic circles. Arnold Toynbee, too, reacted against it in a striking way, with postulates that, of course, today find little hearing. Toynbee points out the difference between material-technical progress on one hand and real progress on the other, which he defines as spiritualization. He admits that the West—the western world—is in crisis, and he sees the cause for this in the decline from religion to the worship of technique, of nation, of militarism. Ultimately, for him, the crisis means secularism.

If we know the causes of the crisis, then we can find a way to cure it: the religious factor has to be reintroduced. In his view, part of this is “ the religious heritage of all cultures, but especially what is left of western Christianity.” He opposes the biologistic vision with a voluntaristic vision, which rests on the power of creative minorities and on exceptional individual personalities.

So the question is: is this diagnosis correct? And if so, is it within our power to reintroduce the religious moment, in a synthesis of residual Christianity and mankind’s religious heritage? In the end, the question between Spengler and Toynbee remains open, because we cannot see into the future. But independently of that, we must face up to the task of asking ourselves what the future can guarantee us, and what is able to keep alive the interior identity of Europe through all the historical metamorphoses. Or even more simply, what promises, for today and tomorrow, too, to impart human dignity and an existence that conforms to that dignity?

Thus we are faced with the question: how are things to go ahead? In the violent turbulence of our time, is there a European identity that has a future and for which we can commit ourselves with our whole being? I am not prepared to enter into a detailed discussion on the future European Constitution. I would just like to indicate briefly the fundamental moral elements, which to my mind should not be missing.

The first element is the “unconditionality” with which human dignity and human rights must be presented as values that precede any jurisdiction on the part of the state. These basic rights are not created by the legislator, nor conferred on the citizens, “but rather exist in their own right, are always to be respected by the legislator, are given previously to him as values of a superior order.” This validity of human dignity, previous to every political action and to every political decision, refers back ultimately to the Creator: only He can establish values that are founded on the essence of man and that are intangible. That there be values that cannot be manipulated by anyone is the real, true guarantee of our freedom and of man’s greatness; Christian faith sees in this the mystery of the Creator and of the condition of the image of God that He conferred upon man.

Now, almost no one these days would directly deny the precedence of human dignity and basic human rights over all political decisions; the horrors of Nazism and its racist theories are still too recent. But in the concrete sphere of the so-called progress of medicine there are very real threats to these values: whether we think of cloning, or of the conservation of human foetuses for organ donation, or of the whole field of genetic manipulation—no one can ignore the gradual erosion of human dignity that threatens us here. Added to this are the growth in the traffic of human persons, of new forms of slavery, trafficking in human organs for transplant. Good ends are always adopted in order to justify what is unjustifiable. In these sectors there are some hard and fast rules in the Charter of basic human rights we can be happy with, but on some important points it is still too vague. And it is precisely here that we jeopardize the seriousness of the principle at stake.

The second point in which the European identity appears is marriage and the family. Monogamous marriage, as the basic structure of the relationship between man and woman and, at the same time, as the cell of the formation of the state community, is derived from biblical faith. This has given Western Europe as well as Eastern Europe, its own particular face and its own particular humanity, precisely because the form of fidelity and self-denial set out here had always to be conquered, over and over again, with much effort and suffering. Europe would no longer be Europe if this fundamental cell of its social structure were to disappear or be essentially changed.

The Charter of Fundamental Rights speaks of the right to marriage, but does not express any specific protection for marriage—either juridical or moral—nor give it a more precise definition. And we all know how threatened marriage and the family are at present—on one hand by eroding their indissolubility through easier forms of divorce, and on the other hand by means of a new and more and more widespread lifestyle, the cohabitation of man and woman without the juridical form of marriage.

In stark contrast to all this is the request for communion of life between homosexuals, who paradoxically now demand a juridical form having the same value as marriage. This tendency marks a departure from the system of mankind’s moral history, which, notwithstanding all the diverse juridical forms of marriage, always recognized that marriage is, in its essence, the particular communion of man and woman that is open to children and thus to the family.

This is not a question of discrimination, but rather the question of what the human person is, as man and woman, and of how the togetherness of man and woman can be given a juridical form. If on one hand their togetherness is more and more detached from juridical forms, and on the other hand, homosexual union is seen more and more as having the same value as marriage, then we are before a dissolution of man’s image that can have only extremely grave consequences.

My last point is the religious question. I do not want to enter into the complex discussions of recent years, but to focus on only one aspect that is fundamental for all cultures: respect for what the other holds sacred, and in particular respect for the sacred in the highest sense, for God, something that we can legitimately suppose to find even in one who is not disposed to believe in God. Wherever this respect is denied, something essential in a society is lost. In our present-day society, thank God, whoever dishonours the faith of Israel, its image of God or its great personalities, is fined.

Whoever scorns the Koran and the basic convictions of Islam is fined, too. Instead, with regard to Christ and to what is sacred for Christians, freedom of opinion seems to be the supreme good, and to limit this would seem to threaten or even destroy tolerance and freedom in general. Freedom of opinion, though, finds its limit in this, that it cannot destroy the honour and the dignity of the other; it is not freedom to lie or to destroy human rights.

The West reveals here a hatred of itself, which is strange and can be only considered pathological; the West is laudably trying to open itself, full of understanding, to external values, but it no longer loves itself; in its own history, it now sees only what is deplorable and destructive, while it is no longer able to perceive what is great and pure.

By Joseph Ratzinger—May 14, 2004