Last week some fool posted a silly op-ed in the Washington Square News, ranting about Muslims coming to “infect” America and how the West is too weak to stop it. It touched upon Iraq but not coherently, jumping from topic to topic and not really backing his assertions up with anything. In the end, it was a xenophobic tirade with poor logic.
I wrote a reply, and it was published, albeit cut down to half the size. I thought maybe I should post the full thing, which I couldn’t have done without my friends Haroon and Jawad.
To the editor,
Last week an author named Sam Gilbride wrote a piece on these pages called “In the war on terror, failure means the end of our world.” Title aside, he changed his argument to a “war on Islamic fundamentalism,” launching into a polemic about Muslims and how nearly 1/3 of humanity are bogeyman coming to get him. First, I think his premise is misinformed; it’s not a war on islamic fundamentalism, its a “war on terror.” As a Muslim, I know that someone who believes in the peaceful fundamentals of Islam cannot be confused with someone who’s a violent terrorist. Murder is a sin according to my religion; those who do so violate the clear language of the Qur’an. Anyone who can’t tell those two groups of people apart shouldn’t be writing editorials.
I won’t call it “the war against Islamic fundamentalism” as he did. It’s a common myth that all terrorists are Muslim, and he
seems to buy this. All religious extremism is equally dangerous; Christian fundamentalists were convicted in the Abu Ghraib scandal, Jewish
fundamentalists assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Rabin, Hindu extremists went on pogroms against minority Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, etc. While terrorism is certainly an important issue, as Bush loves to remind us, terrorists have never won against any government yet. Instead, governments fall from within through domestic forces, e.g. the Nazis used the terrorist attack on the Reichstag building as a justification for seizing power and suppressing rights.
He chides the weakness of the liberal model without defining it. If Mr. Gilbride believes the Western liberal model is weak, then why is he defending it?
Let me do it for him; The strength of the USA is our ability to accept difference and allow diversity in a society. If a society can’t show genuine
tolerance and acceptance, then it is diseased. Until that’s fixed, people will always look for an external enemy.. In this case, Mr. Gilbride is trying to target Muslims. He’s appealing to emotion not reason; if Americans don’t deal with the Muslims, they’ll “infect our civilization,” as he put it. There’s nothing to respond to, it’s just fluff. He apes Hitler, only substituting “Jew” with “Muslim.”
Mr. Gilbride profoundly misunderstands the Muslim world. It’s not Islam that hates the West, although Islam hates injustice wherever it appears. People aren’t fighting for Islam as an ideology, but fighting against what they perceive as injustice. How come Al Qaeda never attacks Sweden? He also overgeneralizes; none of the thousands of Muslims I know hate the West. Albanians are Muslim, but they greeted Bush last year like he was a rock star. People in Iran wear Levi jeans. MTV is popular in Egypt. Mr. Gilbride doesn’t seem aware that the so-called “clash of civilizations” has been debunked years ago.
Mr. Gilbride, why not lay blame on those who place us in danger? Our CIA financed and trained Afghani fighters, who years later joined Al Qaeda. Iran’s democracy was toppled in a CIA-led coup, later backfiring spectacularly against us. We with France overthrew democracy in Algeria in 1992, in Palestine in 2006, appearing as hypocrites in the world. Bush reacted to 9/11, but he never addressed any causes. Instead, with Iraq he created armies of terrorists, feeding Al Qaeda’s air supply, he fanned the flames. Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo were gasoline on his fire.
At the least Gilbride might define his terms within the title: What is he considering a “loss” in the war on terror?
Would giving Iraq more craters than the moon be a loss, or withdrawing? When America lost in Vietnam, did America cease to
exist? Did disgruntled Vietnamese bomb America in retaliation for the millions of deaths in their country? No.
According to him, these ‘bogeyman’ Muslims don’t respect Western freedoms. That’s odd, aren’t these freedoms the Bush administration is curtailing? All civil liberties progress since Martin Luther King has been wiped out in Bush’s war; there’s talk of resurrecting COINTELPRO, racial profiling is now endorsed by some politicians, people are calling for segregating Muslims at airports, 39% of US citizens want Muslims to carry special ID. It’s an odd irony of life that Muslims strongly endorsed Bush in the 2000 election; he promised an end to Clinton’s “secret evidence” laws and championed Arab-American rights.
Here I am, having to rebut an absurd argument that pretends the West is under siege from the Islamic world. This is especially aggravating when Mr. Gilbride presumes to tell us that we have not faced a threat so great since Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Nazi Germany was the most powerful military and largest economy arguably of its time, at least the most sophisticated. Nazi Germany was able to conquer most of Europe and drive deep into Russia in the span of a few years; the United States could never have defeated Nazi Germany alone. Now we’re supposed to imagine that countries like Iran or Pakistan represent a similar threat to the world. Are we using drugs? The total annual military budget of Pakistan, the only nuclear power in the Muslim world — is about the same as the Harvard University’s endowment ($20-30 billion). The US spends over $124 Billion on its Navy alone. In other words, they are simply too weak to cause serious or long-term harm to the West.
If the West “loses” the war on terror and we all wind up in a dictatorship, it will be by our own actions, not by others. Foreign forces don’t create police states, it’s the populations within that give up freedoms and arrive at that outcome.
In the words of Russ Feingold, when he was one of the few who voted against the Patriot Act in 2001, “Of course, there is no doubt that if we lived in a police state, it would be easier to catch terrorists. If we lived in a country that allowed the police to search your home at any time for any reason; if we lived in a country that allowed the government to open your mail, eavesdrop on your phone conversations, or intercept your email communications; if we lived in a country that allowed the government to hold people in jail indefinitely based on what they write or think, or based on mere suspicion that they are up to no good, then the government would no doubt discover and arrest more terrorists. But that probably would not be a country in which we would want to live. And that would not be a country for which we could, in good conscience, ask our young people to fight and die. In short, that would not be America.”
In the play, “A Man for All Seasons,” Sir Thomas More questions Mr. Roper whether he would level the forest of English laws to punish the Devil. “What would you do?” More asks, “Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?” Roper affirms, “I’d cut down every law in England to do that.” More replies: “And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast . . . and if you cut them down . . . d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.”
I don’t like the idea that Mr. Gilbride is peddling; that Muslims are less than full members of our America. Last I checked, over half of
all Muslims live in democracies, Muslim Americans are better educated than the national average, and there are thousands of American Muslims serving in
Iraq. It was just as wrong when Hitler singled out Jews in this manner, and it’s just as wrong to do the same to Muslims today.
–Sulayman F.
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that I have fallen into a calamity and not into sin.”