WORLD WAR III IS THE INEVITABLE WAR BETWEEN CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM

The world we live in today is full of hatred and animosity between the Christians and the Muslims. This feud is as old as the emergence of Islam as a religion and it is this same feud that has developed into the various acts of terrorism visible all over the world today. We are all sitting on a virtual time bomb that will explode with the final war between Islam and Christianity. The Islamic fundamentalist nations such as Iran are developing or looking for a nuclear arsenal with which to wage this war and its only a matter of time before they have it.

  Nevertheless, a look at history shows that this was has been with us for a long time and is only about to move into a global world war. When he issued his ill-fated call to save Eastern Christendom from the Muslims around A.D. 1090, Pope Urban II unleashed what scholars across religious and ideological divides agree was one of history's biggest exercises in futility. Over the next 200 years, wave after wave of crusading knights wrecked havoc, death and destruction at the end of which, very little was gained. The holy city of Jerusalem was eventually recaptured by the Muslims, and experts say the only long-term outcome of the Christian Franks periodically storming the lands east of the Mediterranean Sea was an exacerbation of the suspicions and strife between Christianity and Islam.

Those were the mistakes of the Dark Ages, of course, an era when ignorance and barbarity shrouded the Western world before the intellectual illumination of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment saw reason and humanism triumph over superstition and feudalism. But tune in to the discourse sputtering from a number of radio and TV stations across the world in recent months, and "reasonable" is not a term that will instantly spring to the average listener's mind. By all accounts, the radical fringes within Christianity and Islam seem to have launched a modern-day crusade, a slander-to-vanquish battle where the mass media appears to have taken over from the sword as a weapon of choice.

In an interview with CBS' 60 Minutes last year, the Rev. Jerry Falwell called the prophet Mohammed a "terrorist" and "a man of war." Falwell's comments capped a TV season that saw televangelist Pat Robertson call the prophet a "robber and a brigand" and the Rev. Franklin Graham (son of the Rev. Billy Graham) denounce Islam as a "very evil and wicked religion."

On the other side, underground cassette tapes of vitriolic Friday sermons delivered by mullahs across the Muslim world are available from Cairo to Quetta. And from post-9/11 hideouts, al Qaeda continues to release taped messages promising a fight against the "infidels."

"They have taken their rabbis and their monks for gods beside Allah, and also the Messiah son of Mary," said bin Laden in a audiotape released last November. He was expanding on an earlier warning issued before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that the West had "divided the world into two regions — one of faith and another of infidelity, from which we hope God will protect us."

As two Semitic, monotheistic religions (the belief there is only one God) with shared roots, Islam and Christianity have interacted for centuries, and the relationship has had its ups and downs.If history has witnessed the Crusades, the fall of Constantinople, the ousting of the "Moors" from Spain and the Christian European colonialism that surged in the Age of Exploration, there have also been periods of confluence, when arrangements were made for Christian pilgrims to make their way to the Holy Land and scholars across religious divides were invited to debate at royal durbars, or courts.

But after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, whatever spotty appeal the issue of Muslim-Christian ideological harmony had in academic and public discourse quickly faded as a more pugnacious debate pitting the Muslim and Christian worlds in a "civilizational" clash suddenly made it to the top of the charts. With readers and listeners seemingly eager to get to the bottom of the new problem of the times, Western experts posed variants of questions such as "What went wrong with the Muslim world?" and "Why do they hate us?"  By most accounts, answers to the question "Why do they hate us?" tended to yield polarized answers, with several Western scholars referring to some sort of clash of civilizations. On the other hand, many Muslim scholars tended to address the issue as a political one with the answers lying in a complex stew of the impact of U.S. foreign policy, imperialism, and the aftereffects of the Crusades.

In his seminal 1985 work, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, Amin Maalouf argued that while the era of the Crusades led to a cultural and economic revolution in Western Europe, the terrors of the holy wars led the Muslim world to close in on itself, leading to "long centuries of decadence and obscurantism."Huntington, on the other hand, viewed the clash as a necessary conflict that occurs at what he calls a "civilizational fault line" or the "boundary where two or more civilizations meet." However, a careful look at this war that is currently being fought between Islam and Christianity will show that there is no hope to an end until this war leads to a full blown World War III between the Islamic nations and the non-Islamic nations. This War will be the war that leads to the end of civilization as we know it because nuclear weapons will fly over the skies and civilization as we know it will be pushed back to the stone age. This will be the apocalypse—the final holocaust.