The agenda of a radical few
I just read the article by Elli Siapkidou (of ELIAMEP) about the protests over the cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad (February 23). I have also read a very «un-Islamic» letter about the lack of protests over «real» violations of innocents in the name of «Islam»! Recently, I watched an interview on an international channel. The interviewee was of Middle Eastern descent, and has lived for many years in Denmark. He blamed the problem on a few fanatics from one of over 2,000 mosques, in Denmark. These «fanatics» went to Egypt, and other countries in the Middle East, and claimed to represent 200,000 Danish Muslims. This was a lie – they represented nobody! They gave extremely exaggerated descriptions of the cartoons, which was easy as they have never been published in the Islamic world. They claimed that the Danish government had burnt the Koran when just one right-wing group had burnt a copy. The reason for all this behavior is to drive a wedge between the Christian and Muslim worlds. But this is not the aim of all Muslims, just of a radical few. While Greece has been spared in this new struggle of extremes, there are too many Pakistani, and Afghan, immigrants in Greece to be sure that this will not happen here. The Greeks, due to 400 years of Turkish occupation, are by nature anti-Muslim, and Athens is populated by many thousands of Kurds, Pakistanis, Palestinians and ethnic Turkish Muslims. What is happening elsewhere can happen here! The issue is not the cartoons, nor freedom of speech, it is the increasing divide between the Christian and Islamic worlds, as seen through the eyes of a fanatical minority. LES GROVE, Athens.
