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.