On this showing, the nature of the breakdowns of civilizations can be summed up in three points: a failure of creative power in the minority, an answ… - Arnold J. Toynbee

Right and wrong are the same in Palestine as anywhere else. What is peculiar about the Palestine conflict is that the world has listened to the party that has committed the offence and has turned a deaf ear to the victims.

When we compare the pair of Islamic with our pair of Christian societies we see that the Islamic Society which emerged in what we may call the Perso-Turkish or Iranian zone bears a certain resemblance to our Western Society, while the other society, which emerged in what we may call the Arabic zone bears a certain resemblance to Orthodox Christendom. For example, the ghost of the Baghdad Caliphate which was evoked by the Mamluks at Cairo in the thirteenth century of the Christian Era reminds us of the ghost of the Roman Empire which was evoked by Leo the Syrian at Constantinople in the eighth century.

Aurangzeb's purpose in building those three mosques was the same intentionally offensive political purpose that moved the Russians to build their Orthodox cathedral in the city-centre at Warsaw. Those mosques were intended to signify that an Islamic government was reigning supreme, even over Hinduism's holiest of holy places. I must say that Aurangzeb had a veritable genius for picking out provocative sites. Aurangzeb and Philip II of Spain are a pair. They are incarnations of the gloomily fanatical vein in the Christian - Muslim - Jewish family of religions. Aurangzeb - poor wretched misguided bad man - spent a lifetime of hard labour in raising massive monuments to his own discredit. Perhaps the Poles were really kinder in destroying the Russians' self-discrediting monument in Warsaw than you have been in sparing Aurangzeb's mosques.