Does the West owe the Islamic world an explanation for the War on Terror?
Afghan President Mohammed Karzai thinks so. So does the grand imam of Sunni Islam’s most prominent seat of learning, Cairo’s Al-Azhar University.
A diplomatic envoy for the latter is calling on Pope Francis to “declare that Islam is a peaceful religion [and] that Muslims are not looking for war and violence.”
Karzai goes further: He says “the West, as led by the United States” caused Islamist extremism, perhaps deliberately, and so “must explain itself to the Muslim world.”
We would remind the imam’s envoy and the Afghan premier that ever since 9/11 leaders from Tony Blair to George W. Bush to Barack Obama have taken pains to make clear our war is not with Islam but with those who bomb and behead in its name. These leaders have delivered that message many times, at home as well as abroad.
The problem, as former Prime Minister Blair wrote in an recent op-ed piece, is not “with Muslims in general.” The problem is with its extremist strain. And in the wake of the brutal murder of British soldier Lee Rigby on a London street, Blair noted this strain “goes deeper and wider than it is comfortable for us to admit.”
Likewise, a leader from Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority, which has long suffered at the hands of Muslim extremists, says the onus is not on Pope Francis to declare Islam a religion of peace but for “an unequivocal message . . . in the Arabic language that Muslims attacking Christians in Egypt do not conform to a tenet of Islam and will no longer be tolerated.”
We’re all for explanations. But as this Coptic leader suggests, isn’t it time it became a two-way street?