Dear Mr. Shishir

Submitted by Debanjan Banerjee (India), Jul 13, 2013 at 14:49

Timur,Babur,Aurangzeb,Nadir Shah.The various Turkic and Turkish despots put the above gentleman to shame with regard to body counts.

Strange thing that you say. Do you remember Timur gassing people for speaking Kurdish like Saddam did , do you remember Babur or Aurangzeb having CIA-trained secret police and torture cells like the Shah had , did you remember.

You need to understand the difference. Understandably these were brutal warriors (as the American Puritans were) but unlike the Puritans these people did not kill or imprion people based upon who they were.

Killing people based upon simply their ethnicity was a Western project and that cancer has affected the Muslim world.

Furthermore, Muslims weren't exactly gentle lambs in the equation.The Crusades and establishment of Israel would not be neccesary if the Muslims hadnt captured these areas which belonged to the previous Christian and Jewish owners.

You seem to be living in another world. Jerusalem was destroyed by Romans and Jews were not allowed to visit or settle there. It was the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem which allowed the Jews to come back to Jerusalem.

As per as the Christians , well the Copts and others in the holy land welcomed the armies of Caliph Omar because they were dying slow death under the tax burden imposed by the Byzantine system.

And if the West is so concerned about Christians then why does it train groups like Al-Qaida to kill Christians in Syria and Iraq ?

You need to understand something A Catholic if he is an Arab would be treated as an Arab by every Western Christian and not as Catholic. In the Western culture and politics , ethnicity triumphs everything.

Desiring European cultural influence is another.

This is the most worrisome part. In my view Western cultural influence breeds dystopian disfunctionalism in the Muslim world and the results can be seen in Al-Qaida who are a product of this European cultural influence.

Somehow Japan,China,India and South East Asia's contacts with the Western world though often less than sparkling and indeed have suffered more from the West.

Can you please specify how these countries like Japan , China , India and South East Asia have suffered more from the West ? When it comes to suffering with whom you are comparing them ?

Japan's early 20-th century history tells is that it became a ruthless colonialist country alike the West was in those days. I do not consider that to be a good outcome at all. If the contact with the West can lead to the rape of Nanjing then better I would say had commodore Perry drowned on his way to Japan.

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