Posted on 10/12/2001 1:25:23 PM PDT by Stand Watch Listen
Yes: Islam opposes Western ideals such as tolerance, democracy and civil liberties.
On Oct. 7, the United States began bombing military installations and terrorist training camps in Afghanistan to avenge those who died in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. To call them victims of terrorism is too narrow a focus. In fact, they fell in the course of a world war — whose other casualties include Jews, Hindus, Orthodox Serbs and Indonesian Christians. It’s hard for ordinary Americans to understand the nature of the struggle when our leaders cling to a Disney version of Islam. President George W. Bush assures us that “the terrorists practice a fringe form of Islamic extremism … that perverts the peaceful teaching of Islam.” If so, a large part of the Islamic world has perverted these peaceful teachings to such an extent that one wonders if the so-called deviation isn’t actually the norm. A more realistic perspective than the president’s was offered by historian Paul Johnson, who wrote in the Oct. 15 issue of the National Review that “attacking terrorism at its roots necessarily involves conflict with the second-largest religious community in the world.” From its seventh-century breakout from the Arabian peninsula until the late 17th century, Islam advanced at sword point, spreading from the Pyrenees to the Philippines. The tide was checked only at the gates of Vienna. From the decline of the Ottoman Empire until the 1970s, Islam ebbed. Today — fueled by oil wealth, surplus population, immigration and the rise of fundamentalism — Islam is resurgent. Instead of wild horsemen, its banners are carried by guerrillas, terrorists, theocrats and tyrants. A two-day conference in Rome in early October was intended to promote Christian-Muslim solidarity. But no sooner had it begun than Muslim clerics who were present were denouncing “arrogant Zionists.” Yusuf al-Qaradawi, director of the influential Sunni Research Center in Qatar, said Muslims “refuse terrorism but don’t consider it terrorism to defend one’s own home.” Last year, al-Qaradawi issued a fatwa decreeing that for Palestinians to stop committing atrocities such as the attack on a Jerusalem pizzeria (where the detonation of a bomb packed with nails shredded the flesh of toddlers) would be “a religious sin and a betrayal of the nation.” And al-Qaradawi is considered a moderate. Imagine prominent Christian clerics debating the “morality” of Timothy McVeigh’s mass murder in Oklahoma City. Well, just such a discussion has been going on among Islamic authorities regarding suicide attacks against Israelis. The mufti of Saudi Arabia says that since the Koran forbids self-destruction, suicide bombings are impermissible, though the deaths of infidels in these attacks doesn’t trouble the mufti. But Sheik Muhammad Sayyed Tantawi, a religious leader of Egypt’s Sunni establishment, claims that taking one’s own life in the process of killing the enemies of Islam isn’t suicide but “self-defense and a kind of martyrdom.” If Islam is so mellow, why are the most contemptible crimes regularly committed in its name? There is no United Methodist Jihad. Suicide bombers don’t quote the Book of Mormon. Individuals aren’t given the choice of conversion to Judaism or death. The day before the tallest buildings in Manhattan were reduced to rubble, this jihad caused blood to flow in the streets of Jos, a Nigerian city of 4 million. In the last year, thousands have died while fighting the attempts of Nigeria’s northern states to impose Islamic law, including floggings, on nonbelievers. In Indonesia, the Laskar Jihad has engaged in a campaign of religious cleansing in the Molucca islands, where as many as 5,000 Christians forcibly have been converted to Islam and the women subjected to genital mutilation in the process. On Oct. 1, a suicide squad blew up the legislative-assembly building in the Indian province of Kashmir (also targeted for conquest), killing 26 people. The Pakistan-based Army of the Prophet Muhammad — there they go again, distorting Islam’s benign teachings — took responsibility. There is an arc of conflict stretching from the west coast of Africa to the Philippines. Wherever sectarian violence rages, Muslims are pitted against non-Muslims. Sudan’s Islamic regime has killed more than 2 million Christians and animists and revived the slave trade to dispose of captured women and children. The objective is to convert or exterminate the nation’s infidels. A world away, the Abu Sayyaf rebels seek to create a Muslim state in Mindanao, an island with 35 percent of the Philippine land mass. Russian President Vladimir Putin has offered to share intelligence with the United States and has toned down his criticism of NATO expansion. In a recent trip to Europe, he talked about increasing oil and gas shipments to the West, to reduce dependence on Arab supplies. Russia still is fighting Muslim separatists in Chechnya. Last year, terrorist bombs exploded in Moscow and elsewhere in the federation (nearly 300 died). Putin may resent Russia’s loss of empire, but when the chips are down he understands that the survival of Orthodox Russia lies with the West. In addition to human casualties, Islam’s war involves attacks on sacred symbols of other faiths. Last year, Palestinians destroyed the Tomb of Rachel, which is one of Judaism’s holiest sites. An American-born rabbi who rushed into the flames to save the Torah scrolls was murdered. A mosque was raised where the shrine’s synagogue once stood. Throughout the Middle East, thousands of churches have been demolished and replaced by mosques over the centuries. A mosque under construction in Nazareth is intended to overshadow the churches of Jesus’ boyhood home. Under the Palestinian Authority, Bethlehem’s Christians have dwindled from 80 percent to 20 percent of the city’s population. When Jordan controlled the Old City of Jerusalem, 58 synagogues were razed and Jewish cemeteries desecrated. Since NATO turned Kosovo over to Albanian Muslims, hundreds of Orthodox churches and monasteries have suffered a similar fate. The Taliban’s outrageous Buddha bashing should be seen in this light. It’s not enough to subjugate, and in many cases, exterminate unbelievers. Any evidence that there once was another religion on Islamic soil must be effaced. Guiding principles for policymakers include the following: Muslims have made it clear that sovereignty is one more step toward the liquidation of Israel — the hated colonial outpost in the heart of Islam. Today, Israel still has some control over weapons and forces that enter the West Bank. With statehood would come total militarization. Israel would suffer the fate of the rump Czech state after the Sudetenland was ceded to Hitler. Those who would defend the West must first understand the nature of the conflict. The West has a stake in the outcome of this contest. Not only is the Jewish state our most reliable regional ally, but if Israel falls, pressure would increase on other frontline states. Albanians celebrated by driving out 80 percent of the province’s Serbs. Hundreds were killed and hundreds more are missing. Reconstituted KLA fighters have made incursions into what’s left of Yugoslavia and, until quite recently, were fighting a full-scale war in Macedonia. The Macedonian truce is fragile at best. Its price was greater political influence for the nation’s Albanian minority, concessions backed by the presence of a 3,500-man NATO force. In the Balkans, Islam’s strategy has been to create turmoil (the trouble in Kosovo started when the KLA began murdering Yugoslav officials), provoke an overreaction, then get the West to intervene and create autonomous Muslim states. Osama bin Laden has his tentacles in Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya and the Philippines. Northern Nigeria’s move to implement Sharia is funded by Saudi Arabia. Indonesia’s Laskar Jihad includes veterans of fighting in Afghanistan and Bosnia. According to an Oct. 22, 2000, article in The Guardian, British Muslims were being trained in camps in the United Kingdom and sent to Lebanon and Jordan to join the holy war against Israel. Islam now is the fastest-growing religion in the United States (an estimated 7 million followers). While many of these people are peaceful — and some may have left the Arab world to escape sectarian strife — immigrant communities contain terrorist cheering squads. When the imam at New York City’s Hazrat-I-Abubakr Sadiq mosque denounced the World Trade Center attack, half of the congregation walked out. Is it wise for the West to import a potential fifth column? Doubtless, the above will be decried as fear-mongering and intolerant. But tolerance is a Western concept that — along with democracy and civil liberties — does not exist in the Islamic world. Unlike communism during the Soviet twilight, there are millions — perhaps hundreds of millions — across the globe who are willing to die and kill for this creed. Platitudes about terrorists perverting peaceful Islam only obscure a harsh reality.
Feder is an editorial writer for the Boston Herald. He is a nationally syndicated columnist and the author of Who’s Afraid of the Religious Right? and A Jewish Conservative Looks at Pagan America.
No: Islam, Judaism and Christianity historically produce societies with like characteristics.
By Antony T. Sullivan
No: Islam, Judaism and Christianity historically produce societies with like characteristics.
Islam — as a religion, culture and society — most emphatically is not an enemy of the West. Those who argue the contrary slander not only the third and last of the three great Abrahamic revelations but make all too likely the outbreak of either a religious war pitting Christianity (and perhaps Judaism) against Islam or a war of civilizations pitting the West against the entire Muslim world. And be assured: Any wars of religion or civilization will not be wars that the West — or the United States — will win. This, of course, does not mean that the war now under way should not be prosecuted in the most energetic, merciless and sustained fashion possible. But to the extent feasible it should be fought as a guerre de l’ombre (a war in the shadows), focusing on destruction of the Afghani sources of international terrorism and the overthrow of the Taliban regime. Unless incontrovertible evidence is adduced of involvement of any state other than Afghanistan in the terrorist operation of Sept. 11, public bombing or ground campaigns should be limited to Afghanistan alone. Under no circumstances should the war be permitted to degenerate into any “war of civilizations” or to be perceived by Arabs or Muslims as such. Years before the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, distinguished scholars such as professors Samuel Huntington of Harvard University and Bernard Lewis of Princeton University, and publicists such as Daniel Pipes and Steven Emerson, were suggesting the possibility of clashes between Islam and the West, and the likelihood that Muslims worldwide might support terrorism to destroy Western civilization. Their work, implicitly or explicitly, prepared the ground for the U.S. Anti-Terrorism Act of 1996 and the consequent jailings without charge of up to 19 Arabs or Muslims in the United States. At least one of the individuals imprisoned was held for more than three years. No evidence of culpability of any of these individuals ever was adduced publicly, and most of these Arab or Muslim detainees are fortunately now free on court order. Ideas — particularly those of distinguished scholars — do have consequences, and bad ideas may indeed have very bad consequences. Judaism, Christianity and Islam all trace their origins back at least to the Old Testament prophet Abraham. Each of these three religions venerates him. Each of these Abrahamic faiths has similarities with the other two, and each historically has produced civilizations and societies with recognizably similar characteristics. Not only is Islam not an enemy of the West, but it, like Judaism, is part of the larger civilizational ecumene that we in the contemporary West know — or ought to. In fact, the West stops at the Indus, not at the Dardanelles. Today, Islam is part and parcel of the West, just as the West is part and parcel of Islam. What occurred on Sept. 11 was first and foremost an attack on Islam itself. Specifically, that criminal operation constituted an attack on the values of compassion, beneficence and mercy that pervade the Koran and that historically have characterized the practice of Islam. The ignorant terrorists responsible for the operation of Sept. 11 might have done well to reread the fatiha (the eight opening lines) of the Koran. There, they would have found compassion and mercy mentioned a total of four times. And they would have done well to read Chapter 5, Verse 32 of the Koran: “We prescribed … that whosoever kills a person, unless it be for manslaughter or for mischief in the land, it is as though he had killed all mankind. And whosoever saves a life, it is as though he had saved the lives of all men.” Moreover, had they consulted additional portions of the Koran, they might have discovered that the planned operation only could have been undertaken by Muslim apostates. To the extent that the Koran endorses war at all, it endorses only defensive combat designed to protect the Islamic community in the most dire of circumstances. No faithful Muslim possibly could justify the operation of Sept. 11 within that limitation. The Koran includes passages invoking violence. But so does the Old Testament, in considerable number. To wit, Deuteronomy 32:42: “I will make my arrows drunk with blood, and my sword shall devour flesh; and that with the blood of the slain and of the captives, from the long-haired heads of the enemy.” (See also Deuteronomy 2:34, 3:6 and 7:2.) Evocations of violence in religious texts is one of many elements the Abrahamic religions share. Contemporary terrorists who invoke Islam to justify their actions are utterly ignorant of classical Islamic law. Muslim jurisprudence is categorical: It prescribes the harshest penalties, including death, for terrorism. Crimes defined as terroristic and/ or criminal in classical jurisprudence include the poisoning of wells, abduction, brigandage, night assaults and rape. Modern terrorists who proclaim themselves Muslims seem unaware that the Koran makes clear that the injustice of others in no way excuses any injustice of one’s own. For almost a decade Muslim religious leaders and public figures have been sponsoring international conferences designed to demonstrate the fallacy of any notion of Islam being an enemy of the West or the likelihood of any clash of civilizations. I know, because I have participated in several of these conferences. Those who persist in merchandising notions of Islam being an enemy of the West should know that there is an almost universal rejection of this idea in the Muslim world itself. Such writers mislead Western public opinion and alienate Muslims everywhere who otherwise might be only too glad to be friends with the West. The Sept. 11 attack has been publicly and categorically condemned by the most important Islamist leaders and public figures in the world. On Sept. 24 the London-based Arabic daily al Quds al Arabi published a statement in which more than 75 such individuals forcefully denounced the “terrorist aggression on large American installations which killed innocent victims belonging to more than 60 countries.” They described the tragedy as a “crime against humanity” and called upon all believers in the sanctity of human life to “denounce and fight against terrorism wherever it is and regardless of the ethnicity or religion of those involved in it.” These Islamists added that “all those proved to have committed terrorist acts against humanity … should be tried and punished, without any kind of allowances.” Rather than any antipathy emanating from Islam, Americans and other Westerners should recognize that anger toward the United States in the Muslim world emanates primarily from the rage at specific American policies. U.S. partiality to Israel at the expense of Palestinians, maintenance of sanctions on Iraq that fail to weaken Saddam Hussein while resulting in the death of half-a-million Iraqi children, and consistent failure to support individual liberty and limited government in Muslim states are among their major grievances. Those who pontificate on Islam somehow being an enemy of the West almost never mention or grant any legitimacy to this list of complaints. And these grievances are fully shared by the 7 million American citizens who now are Muslim. One of the most promising contemporary initiatives in interfaith and intercivilizational dialogue is the Circle of Tradition and Progress, which brings together distinguished Western and Muslim (Islamist) thinkers to explore and combat the worldwide challenge of radical secular modernity. The philosophic basis for this joint enterprise is the thought (from the Western tradition) of such thinkers as Thomas Aquinas, Edmund Burke, Eric Voegelin, Gerhart Niemeyer and Russell Kirk. Muslim participants adduce Islamic thinkers of similar philosophic orientations. In distinction to speculations about impending civilizational conflict, the Circle of Tradition and Progress represents a practical ecumenical endeavor whereby the West and the Islamic world may jointly address the viruses of modernity that today so threaten us all. The statement of purpose of the Circle of Tradition and Progress offers sage advice on how to conduct international relations. The statement reads: “We favor the conduct of international relations on a basis of respect for all of the world’s civilizations. We oppose all attempts to export or impose cultural systems, to support dictatorial regimes or to obstruct democratic transformation. It is our conviction that attempts to reinvent the Cold War with Muslims targeted as enemies of the West, or the West as enemies of Islam, are deplorable and should be avoided. We are united in our belief that all such Manichaean formulations will impede cooperation between Muslims and the West, and are likely over time to have a dramatically negative impact on both international stability and world peace.” Bush-administration officials charged with responding to the Sept. 11 attack might well be guided by such counsel. If the contemporary tendency to depict Islam as an enemy of the West is unconscionable, it also is understandable. So is the popular receptivity to this perverse idea that characterizes Western culture. The roots of this disposition reach back at least as far as the Crusades. The Western conviction of an alien and menacing Islamic “other” was solidified by the centuries of war between the Ottoman Empire and Western and Central Europe. It was exacerbated by European colonialism and the Christian missionary enterprise of the 19th century and the evangelical revival today, and it currently flourishes as a result of the serious challenge that the Islamic revival presents to the long-term viability of the state of Israel. It is not by chance that those most frequently proclaiming that Islam is an enemy of the West are themselves fervent partisans of Israel or (as in the case of former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu), Israelis themselves. Islam is in no way a challenge to the West, but in its political form it may well present a threat to Israel. If so, that is Israel’s problem, not ours. Israel alone can mitigate any Islamic threat only by dealing justly with all its neighbors, and most specifically with the Palestinians. As a Republican and a conservative, I call on my philosophical comrades in arms to reject the anti-Islamic triumphalist warmongering of neoconservative ideologues. And I urge all Americans to repudiate any belief that Islam is an enemy of the West. This idea is wrong. Worse, it is dangerous. To all of us. Especially now.
;Sullivan, a senior scholar of the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Michigan, has written several books and articles about Islam.
By Don Feder
View specific conflicts as fronts in a global war. Bush recently backed Palestinian statehood, rewarding Yasser Arafat for the yearlong carnage he unleashed on Israel, not to mention Palestinians dancing in the streets over American deaths on Sept. 11.
Don’t try to fight terrorism at the expense of those targeted by rogue states. The United States is courting Sudan. Pakistan suddenly is an ally. But Sudan is waging total war on the nation’s Christians. Kashmiri terrorists are trained in Pakistan. By advancing adversaries and undercutting real friends, we buy ourselves more trouble in the long run.
Don’t facilitate Islamic expansion. At the Dayton conference, the West created a Muslim enclave in Bosnia, a corridor into Europe. In 1999, NATO came in on the side of the pimps and drug dealers of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). For 78 days we bombed Belgrade until even former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic agreed to withdraw from the Serbs’ historic heartland.
See the interconnectedness of the struggle. A story in Newsweek (“A Spreading Islamic Fire,” Feb. 19) observed: “In the West Bank, in devastated Chechnya and embattled Kashmir, in parts of Indonesia and the Philippines, … Islamist extremists are on the move and in contact with each other.”
Tighten immigration. Before the province was wrested from Yugoslavia, Muslims became a majority in Kosovo through massive illegal immigration from Albania. There are 5 million Muslims in France and more mosques than churches in the nation’s south. Bologna’s Cardinal Biffi urges Italy to favor Roman Catholic immigrants over Muslims to “save the nation’s identity” from “Islam’s ideological attack.”
No politicians should be looking for him for policy tips.
Should policymakers see Islam as an enemy of the West?
YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
He can't possibly believe this.
I take issue with Sullivan's allegation that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam historically have manifested quite similar societies. (Certainly there seem to be radical differences in the status of women in these different societies -- differences that have persisted over centuries.) Anyone willing to look objectively at the Arab world, in history and at present, might have a problem finding evidence to back that claim. But I'd be glad to see any such evidence.
Thanks again, SWL, for the thought-provoking post. best, bb.
Sullivan uses nice big words, quotes big important Muslim organizations. But what's important is the Islam of the street. What are the mullahs and imams of the Muslims cities and neighborhoods doing? They're preaching JIHAD against the West and Israel. They're the ones the people are listening to. And the people sympathize with Osama Bin Laden. Islam is our enemy and we in the U.S. didn't make it that way.
The same, tired arguments of the US-hating liberal left.
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