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.