Do people simply want to stoke the flames? I don't understand this fear-mongering. -BM Islam: Truths Obama Forgot in Cairo On June 28, 1914, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne was assassinated in Sarajevo by Black Hand, a Serbian nationalist secret society. In a World War that followed, over 40 million people died between 1914 and 1918. The war also brought down four empires – the Ottoman empire, the Austro-Hungarian empire, the German empire and the Russian empire. Most historians will say it wasn’t the assassination of Ferdinand that led to the war. Rather it was the desire of the Austro-Hungarian leaders to go to war that made them give impossible conditions for a form of peaceful restitution. In 1939, two on-going wars amalgamated to create the Second World War. The first was the Sino-Japanese war where Imperial Japan was trying to lord it over the rest of Asia. Japan had attacked mainland China, bombing Shanghai and Guangzhou. The second war was invasion of Poland in pursuance of its eternal quest to dominate Europe. Germany had to fake a Polish attack on a German post to instigate the war. From 1939 to 1945, over 70 million people were killed in the most wildly spread war the world had ever seen. It has been over five decades since the last major world war was fought. The stage is set for another major conflict. It may be triggered by a single assassination of a leader somewhere or an amalgamation of two wars. Already, the war on terror, which in many ways is seen as a war on radical Islam, is ongoing and is happening across the globe. At the core of this war is a clash of civilization – a fight for one civilization to lord it over the other. Each day, the world holds it breath wishing that it does not amalgamate with another war. Breaking away from diplomatic language, Silvio Berlusconi, the prime minister of Italy once told journalists in Berlin that, “We should be conscious of the superiority of our civilization, which consists of a value system that has given people widespread prosperity in those countries that embrace it and guarantees respect for human rights and religion. This respect certainly does not exist in the Islamic countries.â€
