Ignorance and misunderstanding

At a Clarence House reception for religious leaders on 17 December 2013, Prince Ghazi of Jordan said this:

“Christians were present in the Arab world 600 years before Muslims.”

Prince Charles said this at the same reception:

“We cannot ignore the fact that Christians in the Middle East are increasingly being deliberately targeted by fundamentalist Islamist militants…

For 20 years I have tried to build bridges between Islam and Christianity and to dispel ignorance and misunderstanding… We have now reached a crisis where the bridges are rapidly being deliberately destroyed by those with a vested interest in doing so. This is achieved through intimidation, false accusation and organised persecution.”

Perhaps, Charlie, instead of trying to build bridges, bridges which, of course, allowed your fundamentalist Islamic militants to target British Christians, as well as those in the Middle East, you’d have done better not to build them at at all.

Funny isn’t it, those who think they know so much better and see so much further than the rest of us, you know, those who are forever seeking to dispel our ‘ignorance and misunderstanding,’ almost always seem to end up saying and thinking what we were saying and thinking decades before.

That’s elite privilege for you. You can be a 180 degree airhead-in-the-wrong and do incalculable damage to tens of millions who put their trust in you but, as long as you perform a half-hearted volte face 20 years on, you can come riding to the rescue with the reality.

In 1993, speaking at Oxford University, Prince Charles said:

"Islam can teach us today a way of understanding and living in the world which Christianity itself is poorer for having lost."

In a speech at the Foreign Office Conference Center on 13 December 1996, he said this:

"There is much we can learn from that Islamic world view… We need to be taught by Islamic teachers how to learn with our hearts, as well as our heads."

On 30 October 2005, The Washington Times reported thus:

“Prince Charles has done more than any other member of the royal family in history to understand Islam. He said in 1994 that when he became supreme governor of the Church of England, he would rather be ‘defender of faiths’ than ‘defender of the faith.’

A year earlier Prince Charles made a speech, acclaimed throughout the Arab world, on relations between Islam and the West. He urged the West to overcome its ‘unthinkable prejudices’ about Islam and its customs and laws. He spoke warmly of what he called the West’s debt to the culture of Islam and distanced moderate Muslims from militants. 

‘Extremism is no more the monopoly of Islam than it is the monopoly of other religions, including Christianity,’ he said.”

Tell that to your Middle Eastern targets, Charlie.