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The Bush Administration policies of unwavering support for Israel, hostile overtures to Iran, and clampdowns on Muslim civil liberties in the U.S. continue to fan the flames of anti-American sentiment in Muslim countries and play into the hands of pro-terrorism Muslim clerics. In the past, the US has made meager attempts to ameliorate this backlash by launching a massive advertising campaign (known as “Shared Values”) that, in part, ran paid TV ads that depicted American Muslims. These Muslims described how the US grants freedom of religion and allows economic opportunities to everyone, including Muslims. The ads ran last year and were so unpopular that people in Syria, Egypt and Jordan demanded that they be removed. The psychology that prompted this uproar is not that difficult to understand. The typical Muslim from these countries has no doubt that American Muslims live the “good life”. However, they feel that the US government has only an economic interest in Muslim countries with little care for the Muslim citizens of these countries.
How can anti-Americanism be countered in Muslim lands? One way would be for the US to sponsor a non-military program that performs community services. This would demonstrate that the US is willing to build up nations rather than tear them down. The real key to this program would be to recruit moderate American Muslims to perform these services. A program that puts American Muslims side-by-side with indigenous Muslims would prevent recipients of aid from feeling that accepting a helping hand is akin to accepting the American ideology. American Muslims could communicate with indigenous Muslims on a level that cannot be achieved by American non-Muslims. They share a common language of Islam, which will serve as a mechanism to instill trust.
Responsible American Muslims categorically reject terrorism as a means to achieve basic human rights. Aside from press releases denouncing terrorist acts and demonstrations for peace in Iraq and the West Bank, American Muslims can play a more fundamental and pro-active role in the war against terrorism and for the promotion of world peace. For such a program to achieve the goal of instilling good will between local Muslim populations and the US it must carefully screen its American Muslims for two important characteristics. First, he/she should have a skill set that will aid the people in those lands. Second, and perhaps more importantly, he/she should have some fundamental knowledge about Islam etailing their supposed plot to conquer the world. This was, in fact, the Tsar’s way of drawing attention away from his own autocracy, getting people to blame the Jews, a minority in Russia, and not his own regime. In 1917, a violent (Communist) revolution overthrew the Tsar, his dynasty destroyed by a bloody basement murder. What a remarkable subterfuge he produced. To this day, people all over the world take The Protocols seriously, so much that they view the Russian revolution as the work of Jews operating according to the principles revealed in The Protocols. Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy.
There’s a lot of criticism about Israel, its policies, its practice and its history. Most of that is legitimate and necessary. But underneath a lot of Muslim analysis lies an unspoken, unfair and irresponsible practice, which finds fault with Israel for things that have nothing to do with her – the practice of a people who no longer understand the world, feel themselves incapable of handling it, or even want to attempt counteracting it.
When I told the group that The Protocols was a forgery, I was told: Go ahead and read it regardless. Why would Muslims rely upon and recommend a tome favored by white supremacists, Nazis and anti-Semites? As much as a Muslim might oppose Zionism, he recognizes the Children of Israel, their place in Islamic history, and the Hebrew Prophets, peace be upon them all. Furthermore, a Muslim man may, should he so choose, marry a Jewish woman. Such a pairing would be anathema to the typical anti-Semite. Yet our own Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, did marry a woman of Jewish background, never once holding her faith or her origin against her.
Lies, sins and injustices are always (eventually) revealed to the world. God gives temporary respite to sinners, allowing them time to reconsider – that is, time to reform. It took Nazism a dozen years of bloodletting to exhaust itself. Communism, which as a system has killed even more people (considering the Red record in Russia, Korea, China, Cambodia and the like), withdrew from the world within a century. And there are, of course, degrees of wrongs, but all have consequences, which come to pass no matter how much the wrongdoer wishes them to disappear. Many people of foresight, justice and tolerance condemned the war on Iraq as silly, short-sighted and counter-productive. Now, mainstream magazines are revealing the wrongs we knew all along. You cannot fool all the people, all the time. Just ask Tony Blair, as support slips from him in ever larger chunks.
How, then, does a Zionist conspiracy of 9/11 proportions go wholly undetected?
The Islamic faith is set apart from all other faiths not because it centers itself on God, but because it does so absolutely. We do not just worship God. We worship only Him. Tawhid, the Islamic idea of the unity of the Divine, is not just the formula: There is no deity but Allah. It is that, but also, that the Lord is incomparable in power, in attributes and in effect. No one, not Muslims, Christians or Jews, controls the world. God does.
Now, more than ever, the leaders of Muslim communities must initiate a process of change. Our obsession with these sham politics is even more galling because of the strangeness of this addiction; we aren’t Zionists, but we are, nonetheless, infatuated with them. Countless problems go unsolved because we have decided, whether consciously or not, that these issues are no longer within our capacity to address. Life is much simpler when it consists of anesthetized existence, punctuated now and then by angry shouts about ghosts in the shadows and nightmares in our dreams, preventing us from being what we do not have the courage to become.
Haroon Moghul, a prolific writer and essayist, graduated New York University in 2002 and is currently doing language studies in Islamabad, Pakistan. His first book, “My First Police State,” is a comedy and a commentary on Saudi Arabia that weaves Islam’s failures, fundamentalism and philosophies into an ever-closer narrative. He is a regular contributor to altmuslim.com, Muslim Under Progress, and more of his writings can be found at his own weblog, Avari-Nameh.
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