Is East-West violence inevitable?

By JAMES P. PINKERTON
LONG ISLAND NEWSDAY
"It's Baghdad here." So say the rampaging Muslims of Paris, according to Newsweek. Those words are a reminder that the West and Islam are engaged in a worldwide struggle, along many different flashpoints -- a clash of civilizations.
That's right: a clash of civilizations. From the Euro-jihad in Paris, to the anti-American violence in Iraq, to the intifada in the Palestinian territories, to the recent threat of the president of Iran to "wipe Israel from the map," to the string of terror-bombings in India and Indonesia, the common thread is a basic hostility between the Judeo-Christian West and the Islamic East.
That was the argument made by Samuel Huntington, a Harvard professor, in his 1996 book "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order," in which he argued that different civilizations naturally find themselves in conflict. When the book appeared, many critics lambasted the author's cultural-historical pessimism. After all, didn't the experience of multicultural New York City in the '90s prove that everybody could get along, at least most of the time? Well, the last 10 years -- most notably 9/11 in that same New York -- have vindicated Huntington.
Indeed, this particular clash of civilizations has been going on for 14 centuries, since Islamic armies first swept over the Middle East, which at the time was mostly Christian. In A.D. 732, a Muslim army nearly reached Paris before being defeated.
Other civilizational clashes go back to the beginning of recorded time. Herodotus, the ancient Greek chronicler known as "the father of history," wrote that Xerxes, king of the Persians, convened a war council in which he told his nobles and generals about his plans to invade in 480 B.C.: "By this course, then we shall bring all mankind under our yoke, alike those who are guilty and those who are innocent of doing us wrong." In other words, the Greek historian painted an unflattering portrait of the Persian king. And some have criticized Herodotus as a mere propagandist for the Greeks.
But that's the point: Different cultures fight about everything, including their separate versions of historical truth.
Avoid contact
So how do we ever reach peace? How do cultures ever stop clashing? There's never been a satisfactory long-term solution, but in the shorter term, the best way of avoiding conflict has been to avoid contact.
That's a lesson that the French didn't learn, since they spent the last two centuries exporting Frenchmen to Muslim lands, even as they imported Muslims into France.
In 1830, France began colonizing Algeria. The Algerians resisted, but the French prevailed after 42 years of fighting. Since they were convinced that the Algerians were naturally subservient, they brought many back to France to do menial labor.
The French colonizers were eventually ejected from Algeria, in a war that killed hundreds of thousands from 1954 to 1962. Now the only enduring legacy of France's colonial venture is the millions of Algerian and other African Muslims who live -- many of them unhappily -- in France.
Other countries are having a tough time with their Muslim populations. Like France, Spain and Britain brought home many ex-colonials, and as the bombings in Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005 prove, the relationship has been rocky. And the Israelis, after decades of trying to subdue the Palestinians, have moved to a far wiser strategy -- total disengagement from Gaza and a big wall across the West Bank.
Oh, and by the way, Americans have had a hard time pacifying Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It's tempting to assign blame for all these conflicts. But the deeper lesson is that violence inevitably erupts when civilizations, West and East, collide. That may change some day, when the lion lies down with the lamb. But until then, the better answer for the two civilizations is to keep their distance.
Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service