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| Ladies and gentlemen,As I stand here with you today, the Arab World is in turmoil, and the wider world is still waging wars with no end in sight. But as I stand here, in the cradle of the three religions, I can only feel how overwhelming this place is. A few meters away, stands the chapel of St Paul on the path he walked. Not too far from it, in the Umayyad mosque, John the Baptist?s head rests. Also close is Damascus old Jewish quarter, with Al Faranj synagogue still celebrating Jewish religious rites. For a moment, this seems surreal in a world that has, for some odd reason, has embraced the doctrine of the clash of civilizations as a rule and not as an exception. But the Damascus I have just described is a symbol; a symbol that should be protected by all means, a symbol to be lived by. Ladies and gentlemen,The venue where one speaks often shed its halo on a speaker, and Damascus?s halo is too significant to be ignored. It is too meaningful to be put behind. It is too loud to be disregarded and the mission it carries is too momentous to be overlooked. This great city of the Levant is a living proof that civilizations do live together. Civilizations only clash when extremism plagues the minds and practices of its people, a kind of hideous extremism fuelled by external and internal greed with the only aim of eradicating the one with a different belief. Ladies and gentlemen,The Arab World is indeed in turmoil, and the wider world is still waging wars with no end in sight. But we, as officials and laymen, have the duty to defend and preserve the mission our countries hold, one that, long before the West adopted democracy, represented the corner stone of democracy, tolerance. This is what we were born in this part of the world to accomplish and this is what we will accomplish. |
Source: http://www.tayyar.org/Tayyar/News/PoliticalNews/en-US/raffoul-syria-ed-273.htm
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