I just came across this news story. It seems that the United Nations is going to undertake efforts to build new bridges between the West and Islam. The program is going to be called “Alliance of Civilizations”. An excerpt…
The campaign’s aim was to “bridge divides and overcome prejudice, misconceptions, misperceptions, and polarization which potentially threaten world peace,” U.N. chief spokesman Stephane Dujarric said.
Recent events had “heightened the sense of a widening gap and lack of mutual understanding between Islamic and Western societies — an environment that has been exploited and exacerbated by extremists in all societies,” he said.
They readily admit that the bombings in London one week ago prompted this move. Taking seven days to call a press conference and announce their resolve to take action is moving at warp speed so far as the UN is concerned. But how long is it going to be before they actually do something? Read the last paragraph of the article and you’ll learn that they’re going to form a committee to study the problem and make suggestions. Don’t expect anything resembling a plan of action until late in 2006.
So nothing concrete is going to be done for at least the next 16 months or so. And this is just for what is, essentially, a public relations campaign. Instead of any internal committee, the UN should hire one of the ad agencies from Madison Avenue. They probably would save some money. They certainly would save a great deal of time.
I haven’t tried to avoid sounding too harsh because, let’s face it, that’s impossible so far as the UN is concerned. Instead I’ll make the prediction that this as yet unformed committee will be very careful to try and assign blame for acts of terrorism equally between Western culture and Islamic society. This is entirely unfair because there is a decided difference between the types of extremists the two environments produce.
