Salam Al-Marayati of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal: “Maj. Hasan is granted the presumption of innocence in our courts of law, be they civilian or military. His military-appointed lawyer will likely advise him not to confess to anything. Legally, that may be sound advice. But religiously that advice cuts against the grain of the divine value of justice. Maj. Hasan must take responsibility for committing two major sins in Islam—the murder of his fellow citizens and the violation of two oaths he took.”
What, then, should U. S. officials do? “Consider allowing Muslim-American religious leaders to meet with Nidal Hasan. Muslim leaders could encourage him to repent. And they could engage Maj. Hasan on his deeply flawed understanding of Islam, explaining that the Quran is an instrument to take people from darkness to light, not the opposite.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, controversial critic of Islam who has lived under police protection in the Netherlands since 2004, says the Swiss vote was a rejection of the minaret as a symbol of political Islam. “Muslims should not be rejected as residents or citizens. The objection is to practices that are justified in the name of Islam, like honor killings, jihad, the we-versus-they perspective, the self-segregation. In short, Islamist supremacy,” she writes on the Christian Science Monitor site.
On the other hand, Swiss novelist Peter Stamm writes in a New York Times op-ed: “Minarets have never been a problem in Switzerland. There are four in the entire country, some of which have been standing for decades. (One of them is in my city but I’ve never seen it.) And only two other minarets were being planned. Most mosques are in faceless industrial districts where no one notices them…. Perhaps Muslims here are more Swiss than the rest of us might think. They too will solve the problem we’ve made for them: they are likely to swallow the results of this referendum, do without their minarets and continue to assemble for prayer, unnoticed and unperturbed.”
The Combating Terrorism Center at the U. S. Military Academy at West Point finds that most of Al Qaeda’s victims are Muslims; only 12% are Westerners. Observes Der Spiegel: “n recent years, the CTC has released a number of excellent studies on terrorism. But because it is actually supplying arguments, backed by scientific research, for the fight against terrorism to decision makers, politicians and military personnel in the US, it cannot be considered strictly neutral…. This perceived lack of neutrality doesn’t change the fact that the fundamental findings of the report are correct and meaningful.”
Stephen Walt, who with his colleague John Mearsheimer wrote this controversial book, has addressed a sensitive question in an article posted on the Foreign Policy website Monday. Walt asks: “How many Muslims has the United States killed in the past thirty years, and how many Americans have been killed by Muslims?” He states that he has attempted to make his estimates conservative, but he finds that the United States has inflicted more casualties than it has suffered, by a factor of about 30. To make his point, he cites the remark of a British journalist: “If the United States wants to improve its image in the Islamic world … it should stop killing Muslims.”
I get his point, but I wish he had addressed criticism along the following lines, with which he is surely familiar, from a critic who suggests that internecine violence among Muslims is the bigger issue: “There isn’t a day goes by without the brutal slaughter of Muslims in both [Iraq and Afghanistan] by al-Qaida or the Taliban. And that’s not just because most (though not all) civilians in both countries happen to be of the Islamic faith. The terrorists do not pause before deliberately blowing up the mosques and religious processions of those whose Muslim beliefs they deem insufficiently devout. Most of those now being tortured and raped and executed by the Islamic Republic of Iran are Muslim. All the women being scarred with acid and threatened with murder for the crime of going to school in Pakistan are Muslim. Many of those killed in London, Madrid, and New York were Muslim, and almost all the victims callously destroyed in similar atrocities in Istanbul, Cairo, Casablanca, and Algiers in the recent past were Muslim, too…. When did the U.S. Army ever do what the jihadists do every day: deliberately murder Muslim civilians and brag on video about the fact?”
A familiar pattern in American politics has manifested itself in Switzerland. A proposal to prohibit the construction of minarets in the country passed by a wide margin Sunday, despite opinion polls that predicted its defeat, not to mention the opposition of the federal government and both Christian and Muslim religious organizations.
Four existing minarets will not be affected. Furthermore, the measure could be subject to challenges in court over whether it violates the religious-freedom provisions of the Swiss constitution. “The symbolic power of minarets — particularly jarring in a country used to church steeples and quiet conformity — seemed to be a driving force behind the yes vote, rather than any specific nuisance,” Edward Cody reported for the Washington Post.
Tara Bahrampour writes for the Washington Post’s “On Faith” feature about the experiences of a 13-year-old Muslim girl from Reston, Va., who decides to start wearing a headscarf to school.
The Washington Post’s “On Faith” feature discusses the problems faced by Muslims in the U. S. military. The report mentions remarks offered by Pat Robertson on his Monday night telecast: “Islam is a violent — I was going to say religion — but it’s not a religion. It’s a political system. It’s a violent political system bent on the overthrow of governments of the world and world domination.”
Robertson knows that George W. Bush and John McCain would not want him to say such things. Furthermore, we never heard such things about Islam before September 11, 2001. Before that — well, the people we now refer to as the Taliban, once were known as the Mujahedin. They were the heroes of the resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. (These statements are subject to considerable interpretation and may not go unchallenged, I am sure.) There was King Hussein of Jordan, a long-standing friend of the United States. You can even watch this video of a prominent American official shaking hands with the notorious head of a predominantly Muslim state — albeit with a secular government at the time — in 1983.
Some months ago I had occasion to attend a lecture and multimedia presentation about the “Muslim agenda for America” — in the meeting hall of a church, the sort of church the halls of which I rarely darken. It has to be said that the individual giving the presentation had converted from Islam to Christianity — and subsequently his siblings had attempted to have him murdered. He then emigrated from his native country to America. He therefore was well acquainted with the darker side of the faith into which he had been born.
The presentation eventually reached the matter of what American Christians ought to do upon encountering Muslim immigrants. The answer, of course, was that Christians ought to be friendly and hospitable — but apparently this hospitality was to consist largely of an attempt to convert the Muslims. What was to be done if the Muslims were unwilling to convert — as most people, having been born into whatever faith they practice, would not be — was left unstated. The presentation moved on to a lurid account of Muslim efforts to win converts in America. At the same time, euphoric atmospherics accompanied news of the successful Christian evangelism in the Muslim world, even in countries as hostile as Iran.
The whole affair left me considerably agitated and upset. Those who need to be exposed to objections to it probably never will encounter such a thing, since they may inhibit a sealed-off media world consisting of their churches, evangelical Christian radio and other media, and such outlets as Fox News.
At a mosque somewhere in Teheran, is there an imam presenting a lurid lecture and multimedia presentation on “the Christian agenda for Iran”? Just asking….
I’ve spent a good bit of the day on Monday in the automobile, and a few minutes’ exposure to talk radio suggests that we may have a controversy over allegations of excessive “correctness” in the media coverage of the Fort Hood shooting. It sounds as though there has been some reticence with regard to identifying Maj. Hasan’s religion and ethnicity — which has aroused distrust and suspicion.
If that is the case, it needs to be addressed. It’s the kind of thing that prompts some people to shun the “mainstream media” in favor of outlets pitched to their own political preferences. Such people, however, will have missed reporting such as this: “Since Sept. 11, the nation’s military has actively recruited Muslim-Americans, eager to have people with linguistic skills and a cultural understanding of the Middle East…. Many Muslims are drawn to the military for the same reasons as other recruits. In interviews, they cited patriotism, a search for discipline and their dreams of attending college. Some Muslims said they had also enlisted to win new respect in a country where people of their faith have struggled for acceptance….”
Yochi J. Dreazen in the Wall Street Journal: “The push to boost Muslim representation has proven to be a double-edged sword for the military, which desperately needs the Muslim soldiers for their language skills and cultural knowledge, but also worries that a small percentage of those soldiers might harbor extremist ideologies or choose to turn their guns on their fellow soldiers.” We’re sure to be hearing more about this….