The premise of Samuel Gilbride's piece, "In the war on terror, failure means the end of our world" (Jan. 22) is plain incorrect: It's not a war on Islamic fundamentalism; it's 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 is a violent terrorist. Murder is a sin according to my religion; those who do so violate the clear language of the Quran. Anyone who can't tell those two groups of people apart shouldn't be writing editorials.
It's a common myth that all terrorists are Muslim. Unfortunately, Gilbride seemed to buy into this. Religious fundamentalism of all sorts is just as dangerous: Christian fundamentalists were convicted in the Abu Ghraib scandal, a Jewish fundamentalist assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Hindu extremists went on pogroms against minority Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, Sikh extremists killed hundreds of Canadians in an 1985 airline bombing, Buddhists in Mandalay went on a rampage and killed people in 2002, et cetera. While terrorism is certainly an important issue, as Bush loves to remind us, terrorists have never won against a government yet. Instead, governments fall from within due to domestic forces.
Gilbride chides the weakness of the liberal model without defining it. If he believes the Western liberal model is weak, then why is he defending it? Let me do it for him: The strength of the West is its ability to accept different values and allow diversity in a society. If a society can't show genuine tolerance and acceptance of different lifestyles, then it is not a healthy society. Until that's fixed, people will always look for an external enemy.
In this case, Gilbride is trying to target Muslims. He's appealing to emotion; 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. It sounds as if he's plagiarizing Hitler, only substituting "Jew" with "Muslim."
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. Has Gilbride ever noticed that Al Qaeda never attacks Sweden? He also overgeneralizes; none of the 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's jeans. MTV is popular in Egypt. The so-called "clash of civilizations" theory was debunked years ago.
If you're going to pontificate on the danger we Westerners are in, why not lay the blame on those who put us in such danger? The CIA financed and trained Afghani fighters, who years later formed the Al Qaeda organization. Iran's democracy was toppled in a CIA-led coup, which later backfired on the West. France and the U.S. backed the overthrow of democracy in Algeria in 1992, and in Palestine in 2006, causing people abroad to label us as hypocrites. Bush reacted to Sept. 11, but he never addressed the underlying causes. Instead, with his Iraq misadventure, he created thousands of bin Ladens. Rather than cutting off Al Qaeda's air supply, he fanned the flames. Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo threw gasoline on the fire.
According to Gilbride's editorial, these bogeyman Muslims are a threat because they don't respect Western freedoms. I find that an odd concept. Are these the same freedoms the Bush administration is curtailing? All of the progress made in civil liberties since Martin Luther King Jr. has been wiped out in Bush's war; racial profiling is now endorsed by some politicians, right-wing pundits are calling for segregating Muslims at airports, 39 percent of US citizens want Muslims to carry special ID, et cetera. It's an 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.
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 e-mail 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."
I don't like the idea that Gilbride is peddling - that Muslims are some sort of single-minded evil that threatens 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 wrong when Hitler singled out Jews in this manner, and it's just as wrong to do the same to Muslims today.
James Ferguson is a contributing writer. E-mail him at opinion@nyunews.com.
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