Heikal’s “Bridges and Barriers”

Very pow­er­ful lec­ture by Heikal in the Oxford “Arab Media” con­fer­ence called “Bridges and Bar­ri­ers”, Heikal denies the exis­tence of “Clash of Civ­i­liza­tions”, and blames the rich “north­ern” coun­tries of cre­at­ing such clash:

Sud­denly the world woke to a new image of the Mus­lim, Arab and non-Arab alike.…Last year Pope Bene­dict XVI stood before a Ger­man university.…delivered a mes­sage that the North is “civilised” while the – mainly Islamic – South is essen­tially barbaric,

He also blames the media for cel­e­brat­ing this clash:

Imag­ine if hordes of reporters and cam­eras had been on hand at the St. Bartholomew mas­sacre, when hun­dreds of thou­sands of French Huguenots were slaugh­tered by their Catholic compatriots…Or if some intre­pid inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ist had man­aged to sneak into the Tower of Lon­don and revealed the night­mare exis­tence of the Tower’s assorted prisoners.

A very good read, you can down­load the Doc. here