The Unholy War Continues

In my last post, I showed a true lack of political perspicacity by foolishly believing the issue of locating a Muslim cultural center in downtown Manhattan had been put behind us. What I left out of my equation was the extent to which politics in this country is driven by appealing to the basest emotions rather than reason. And there now exist in the public marketplace of ideas men and women of such low character that they will essentially play with fire to carry out their personal ambitions. The well is poisoned and just about everyone I speak to has drunk from it. To say a word in defense of Islam or to compare the crimes of Islamic nations to those of a Christian (and now a Jewish) nation is to enter a no man's land in this country, a place gone mad. This, in spite of the mayor of New York City and the president of the United States felicitously having displayed the integrity to utter words of support. (For which, needless to say, they will no doubt pay a political price.)

After it became clear that this was to be made an issue that would not so easily go away, demagoguery as usual began to veil itself behind the appearance of moderation. The cant of the demagogues states that, yes, they have a right to build their center, and, yes, we are proud of religious freedom and tolerance in this country, but sensitivity demands that the builders of the center find another location. Someone obviously got to our state's embattled governor who then found the time to take a stand on the issue and to actually offer state lands at another site. Rick Lazio, whose campaign for governor seems to have nicely survived a Village Voice article that exposed him as a shill of the hedge fund crowd, did not hesitate to take on the pose of a moderator in the "debate" that only continues to exist because of politicians like himself. Even the Catholic archbishop of the New York diocese came forward to offer his services as honest broker. There is no surprise in finding the usual agents of right wing Zionism, brazen veterans of the timeworn strategy of dehumanizing the enemy, going on the record against the center since no opportunity to demonize Islam, which just happens to be the belief system of the people whom they continue to oppress and to kill while occupying their lands.

People on the left are not immune. They acknowledge the demagoguery, but still have some discomfort, some marginal reservations when it comes to Islam. The use of terrorism is one issue. Years ago, when the film Battle of Algiers was first released, I was particularly impressed by one of the lines in the movie. Accused of terror tactics by a French officer, (in spite of the movie's making it clear that it was the French who first employed the tactic), an Algerian resister responds:

"Of course, if we had your airplanes it would be a lot easier for us. Give us your bombers, and you can have our baskets."

I never forgot the line nor did I forget the movie-which, in spite of the complex and disappointing reality that Algeria faced after independence, I recommended to many over the years. In fact, I had recommended the movie to a friend just a few months before the New York Times revealed on its front page that U.S. military commanders in Iraq were being shown the film for training purposes. Now I am in not in favor of killing people with either bombers or baskets, but for the West to disingenouously initiate a propaganda campaign that implies its moral superiority based on its use of bombers is one of the outrages of the modern era. "Yeah, but they kill innocent non-combatants!" Do these folks hear what they are saying? How many innocent non-combatants died in Iraq and Afghanistan? Taken together the estimates vary from 50,000 to over 1,000,000 casualties. Every time a terrorist bomb goes off in a crowded square the Western media deluges us in the blood of innocents, body parts and shoes strewn all over the place. Can you think of the media showing one, a single, solitary target in which what we call "collateral damage" is on lurid display? Moreover, even the issue of "suicide terrorism" as a sign of irrational zealotry had, I believed, been put to rest through the interesting scholarship of Robert Pape, who, in his study Dying to Win illustrates the manifest logic of the tactic for insurgent groups. No use of logic or reason, however, will convince the colonizers of the world to abandon this powerful, even if insidious, propaganda device in their campaigns against the colonized.

The second tenet of the Islamophobes is the Islamic treatment of women. Inevitably unmentioned in such diatribes are the varied and wonderful ways groups right here in the U.S. treat their women. Which lead us to perhaps the most powerful of all the propaganda devices we are now witness to, viz., the "tarring with the same brush" syndrome. If the generalizations we currently hear about an endemic virulence within the Muslim religion were universally applied to opponents within other nations and cultures that we have found ourselves at war at, we should probably have barbed wire fences around militaristic Prussians and Shinto Japanese.

Lost in all this is, as I earlier pointed out, is a long, proud and rich culture to which we ourselves owe a substantial debt. Lost, too, is the diversity of that culture. Hiden from view are the many wonderful men and women among Muslim non-combatants. Ultimately, we must come to understand that the loss is ours, not theirs.

The Insane Campaign Against Islam

Today, the city fathers of New York will decide whether or not to allow the building of an Islamic cultural center in downtown New York, a few blocks from the World Trade Center site. Proponents of the site state their desire to have a center from which they can propagate greater understanding of Islam and Islamic history, and the proposal has the support of Mayor Bloomberg, a man of whom it can be fairly said that he never met a building project he didn't like. In spite of what appears to be an entirely wholesome mission, and in spite of the mayor's support, the proposal has generated a near apoplectic form of opposition from various quarters. The argument that has gotten the most attention in the media is that such a site would be an insult to the memory of all those who died in the Trade Center attack. This is only the most recent manifestation of a generalized attack on one of the world's major faiths that has taken place since the attacks of 911.

It has been commonplace in all the wars that America has fought to dehumanize our various foes. The depiction of the Japanese enemy as monkeys and apes during World War II, the use of the term "gooks" to describe our Korean foes during the Korean War and then later applied (ignorantly, mistakenly, for lack of a better epithet) to the Vietnamese during the war in Vietnam was allowed and encouraged. Even when fighting against our good, white Christian brothers such as the Germans, terms like Krauts and Heinies became part of our vocabulary. To this list we can now add Islamo-fascists, rag heads, terrorists and suicide bombers. The sad reality seems to be that it is just a lot easier to indulge in wholesale killing when one has made the enemy sub-human. A good deal of fine research has been done on the excesses of wartime propaganda in the past, but apparently we were never meant to take such findings as a warning against repeating our mistakes. Perhaps we should not be surprised, yet the frenzy of the attacks on Islam that have grown out of the attacks of 9/11 appear to have a new, more dangerous, and arguably even more irrational dimension than past lapses would have predicted. It is one thing to have soldiers in the field, with all the stresses of being under fire, resort to less than polite or intelligent terminology for the men and women trying to kill them; it is quite another to have, as we currently do, politicians, supposed intellectuals and media talking heads carrying on a campaign of disinformation and that any even moderately well educated individual should be ashamed to participate in.

Most of those who have benefited from a liberal education have long been taught that not only is Islam one of the world's great faiths but that, in the absence of Islamic cultural influence, the civilization we so like to boast of would not have evolved. Advances in mathematics, astronomy, medicine, art and architecture were being made in the Islamic world while the west was still in its dark ages. Islam, unlike Christianity, was and is a faith noted for its tolerance of other faiths. The argument that Islam is a particularly violent religion, prone to making converts at the point of a sword, now being made wholesale, flies not only in the face of Islamic history but of all history. Even if we put aside such historical events as the two world wars fought between good Christian nations in the last century that were responsible for nearly 100 million (mostly civilian) deaths, one might wonder if some of the professional Islamophobes had been too distracted during their early schooling to notice the depopulation of an entire hemisphere and the forced conversion of the remaining survivors under the cross and the sword. Any school child will have noted in fact the similarity between the great symbol of Christianity and the sword hilt as such as Columbus and those who followed him knelt on the beach fronts of North America, South America and the Caribbean, pious Jesuits at their side. It was not Islam that would later introduce the fire-bombing and atomic attacks on civilian populations.

Perhaps what we are suffering through is an inevitable by-product of a dysfunctional education system, for certainly no one with even the slightest knowledge of history could in all honesty ascribe to the readers of the Koran a particular penchant for violence. It is frightening to contemplate the possibility, however, that such know-nothingism is tolerated or even encouraged to serve the larger purposes of U.S. military strategy. Frightening because of its very real dangers and the enormous work it will take to undo such pernicious mythology when the time hopefully arrives when a peace can be brokered. The anti-Islam factions do seem to be a convenient adjunct of a policy that has the world's most powerful military machine using attacks by fringe elements as a rationale for invading and occupying whole nations, killing untold thousands of innocents in the process. What might have been dealt with via an intense, international criminal investigation was instead dealt with via the aerial bombardment of civilian centers and the not so covert encouragement of sectarian strife. Also frightening to contemplate is that the anti-Islam contingent is so potent because it serves the venal purposes of Israeli policy toward the populations of its occupied territories. That so much harm be done merely to serve Israel's short-term and short-sighted strategy is tantamount to a war crime.

It cannot be emphasized enough that this campaign against a faith with millions of adherents living in all the lands that stretch from North Africa through the Middle East, Central Asia, Southeast Asia and the Pacific (with pockets in most other geographic areas including the U.S.) is of a different order than the war time propaganda of the past. It is a campaign that has made its impact on the minds of millions around the world who either know no history or choose to ignore history in the name of a misplaced patriotism. "No, they're different. They are not like us. Look what they do to their women." are sentences uttered wholesale in our brave new millenium. Sadly, it is often even possible to hear such remarks made by one's own family members and friends. The disinformation campaign has been all too effective.

One last thought. Opponents of the Manhattan Islamic cultural center may wish to scan the list of those who died in the World Trade Center attack. There they will find the names of such as Shabbir Ahmad, Salman Hamdani, Mohammad Shah Jahan, Yasmeen Jamal, Mohammed Jawarta, Ahmed Ali, Umar Ahmad, Azam Ahsan... Muslims as well as Christians and Jews suffer for the intrigues of their governments.