Prince Charles to plead Islam's cause to BushOuch! I mean that is so dumb it really hurts. Maybe he is in a post-adolescent manner trying to counteract his father who is refreshingly non-politically correct (didn't he call the Chinesse "gooks" or something like that?), but a pretty nasty piece of work otherwise.
By Andrew Alderson, Chief Reporter
(Filed: 29/10/2005)
The Prince of Wales will try to persuade George W Bush and Americans of the merits of Islam this week because he thinks the United States has been too intolerant of the religion since September 11.
The Prince, who leaves on Tuesday for an eight-day tour of the US, has voiced private concerns over America's "confrontational" approach to Muslim countries and its failure to appreciate Islam's strengths.
The Prince raised his concerns when he met senior Muslims in London in November 2001. The gathering took place just two months after the attacks on New York and Washington. "I find the language and rhetoric coming from America too confrontational," the Prince said, according to one leader at the meeting.
It is understood that Prince Charles did not - and does not - believe that the actions of 19 hijackers should tarnish the reputation of hundreds of millions of law-abiding Muslims around the world.
[...]
One of the few items from my lost previous blog I managed to save was the "Open Letter to Chuck the Lemming", which I wrote (and which I, ever-optimistically, hope he will read one day) when he expressed amazement that the world didn't sing Kumbayah when Islamist terrorists flattened the WTC on 9/11.
“Thank Goodness for Arabic Numerals,” says the Prince of Wales!
HRH the Prince of Wales officially opened the new academic building of the Markfield Institute of Higher Education (MIHE) on 24th January 2003 in the presence of diplomats, key international figures and leading local civic dignitaries. Speaking during his landmark visit to the Islamic Foundation in Markfield, Leicestershire, the Prince acknowledged the historic links between Islam, Muslims and Britain and quipped, “Thank goodness for Arabic numerals!”
His Royal Highness said Leicestershire should be proud to have “in its backyard” such a “pioneering institution is well known for its scholarly work, its publications and its research.” The Islamic Foundation, continued HRH, has, for many years, been at the forefront of dialogue between the Muslims of Britain and their non-Muslim fellow citizens."
Reminding the assembly of Europe’s cultural and academic debt to Islamic civilisation the Prince said, “Thank goodness for Arabic numerals and the concept of the Zero introduced into European thought by Muslim mathematicians!” In addition to talking of Muslims’ contribution to the development of medicine and geometry, and the navigational skills of Muslim seafarers, HRH also remarked upon Islamic contacts closer to home: “My own family benefited from Islamic wisdom…-- Queen Victoria was taught Hindustani using Persian script by Hafez Abdul Karim, one of several Indian staff.”
Yep, Chuck! And we have some pretty china bowls in the family from the time my grandfather-in-law helped to deliver a good ticking off to those gooks during the Boxer Rebellion. Doesn’t mean I like a country and a culture where petty criminals are executed and baby girls left to die -- to mention just two of its shortcomings -- any better.
Chuck! Do you hear me? You can suck up to them until you are blue -- oops, that's the wrong metaphor, of course, until you are BROWN in the face, Chuck, they STILL hate us and despise you for your well-bred naiveté and in case you have overlooked it: they have done nothing during a considerable number of centuries to keep their standard of culture and science up-to-date.
Sure, their ancestors were doctors and sages while your ancestors (and mine) painted their faces blue and hacked each other to death with battleaxes, but nowadays, WE give rocket scientists to the world, while THEY blow themselves and dozens of kids up in discotheques and pizza parlours. But thanks for the numerals!
Another Englishman, the brilliant John Derbyshire (although I think he ought to sue his hairdresser), has put it like that : The 1991 Gulf War showed how little has changed since those first encounters. Here were the armies of the West: swift, deadly, efficient, equipped and organized, under the command of elected civilians at the head of a robust and elaborate constitutional structure. And here were the Arabs: a shambling, ill-nourished, shoeless rabble, led by a mad gangster-despot. (That was their Arabs. There were also, of course, our Arabs -- the Kuwaitis and Saudis, cowering in their plush-lined air-conditioned bunkers being waited on by their Filipino servants while we did their fighting for them.) Final body counts: the West, 134 dead, the Arabs, 20,000 or more. The superiority of one culture over another has not been so starkly demonstrated since a handful of British wooden ships, at the end of ten-thousand-mile lines of communications, brought the Celestial Empire to its knees 150 years earlier. The Chinese are still mad about that: They are still making angry, bitter movies about the Opium Wars. A hundred and 50 years from now, the Arabs will not have forgotten the Gulf War.
And, Chuck, nothing nice you will ever say to or about them will change that.
I have forgotten which Brit it was who said during the Palestine Mandate "The only language an Arab understands is a fixed bayonet", or words to that effect. But whoever said it, it's true. You Brits sadly haven't acted accordingly, the Arabs could take the Mickey out of you then, and they can obviously take the Mickey out of you now. And they despise you for it.
I admired your Scottish grandmother inordinately. When Britain was facing the possibility of a German invasion in WWII and all other of Europe's royal families were either exiled or under German rule, she got a gun, stating: "I won't go down like the others!" Sadly, nothing of that spirit has rubbed off on you.
With me, you always had a sympathy advance because life has dealt you a marked card with that manipulative, psychotic troublemaker of a wife and the dumb international media and even dumber public gave you hell for it instead of commiserating with and comforting you, and because the politically correct do-gooder brigade took that wonderful sport of hunting to hounds from you (and no doubt shooting next), but that advance is used up now.
Oh yes, and Chuck . . . The Arabic numerals were invented by the Indians!
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