'New World Order' Begets Violence ALL EDITIONS

Samuel Huntington's book "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order" is a defining text of our time. Huntington perceives a world of seven or eight major conflicting cultures: the West, Russia, China, India and Islam. Add Japan, South America, Africa. The terrorist at...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inNewsday
Main Author Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Daniel Patrick Moynihan is a former U.S. senator from New York. This is excerpted from the commencement address he gave at Harvard University yesterday
Format Newspaper Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Long Island, N.Y Newsday LLC 07.06.2002
EditionCombined editions
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Huntington, Samuel
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Summary:Samuel Huntington's book "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order" is a defining text of our time. Huntington perceives a world of seven or eight major conflicting cultures: the West, Russia, China, India and Islam. Add Japan, South America, Africa. The terrorist attacks on the United States of last Sept. 11 were not nuclear, but they will be. Again to cite Huntington, "At some point ... a few terrorists will be able to produce massive violence and massive destruction. Separately, terrorism and nuclear weapons are the weapons of the non-Western weak. If and when they are combined, the non-Western weak will be strong." Democracy may not prove to be a universal norm. But decency will do. Our present conflict, as the president says over and again, is not with Islam, but with a malignant growth within Islam defying the teaching of the Quran that the struggle to the path of God forbids the deliberate killing of noncombatants. Just how and when Islam will rid itself of current heresies is something no one can say. But not soon. Christianity has been through such heresy - and more than once. Other clashes will follow.