Posted on 05/26/2005 3:45:48 PM PDT by CHARLITE
It is hard not to notice two contrasting stories that have run side by side during the past week. One is the story about the violent protests in the Muslim world triggered by a report in Newsweek (which the magazine has now retracted) that U.S. interrogators at Guantanamo Bay desecrated a Quran by throwing it into a toilet. In Afghanistan alone, at least 16 people were killed and more than 100 wounded in anti-American rioting that has been linked to that report. I certainly hope that Newsweek story is incorrect, because it would be outrageous if U.S. interrogators behaved that way.
That said, though, in the same newspapers one can read the latest reports from Iraq, where Baathist and jihadist suicide bombers have killed 400 Iraqi Muslims in the past month - most of them Shiite and Kurdish civilians shopping in markets, walking in funerals, going to mosques or volunteering to join the police.
Yet these mass murders - this desecration and dismemberment of real Muslims by other Muslims - have not prompted a single protest march anywhere in the Muslim world. And I have not read of a single fatwa issued by any Muslim cleric outside Iraq condemning these indiscriminate mass murders of Iraqi Shiites and Kurds by these jihadist suicide bombers, many of whom, according to a Washington Post report, are coming from Saudi Arabia.
The Muslim world's silence about the real desecration of Iraqis, coupled with its outrage over the alleged desecration of a Quran, highlights what we are up against in trying to stabilize Iraq - as well as the only workable strategy going forward.
The challenge we face in Iraq is so steep precisely because the power shift the United States and its allies are trying to engineer there is so profound - in both religious and political terms. Religiously, if you want to know how the Sunni Arab world views a Shiite's being elected leader of Iraq, for the first time ever, think about how whites in Alabama would have felt about a black governor's being installed there in 1920. Some Sunnis do not think Shiites are authentic Muslims, and they are indifferent to their brutalization.
At the same time, politically speaking, some Arab regimes prefer to see the pot boiling in Iraq so the democratization process can never spread to their countries. That's why their official newspapers rarely describe the murders of civilians in Iraq as a massacre or acts of terror. Such crimes are usually sanitized as ''resistance'' to occupation.
Salama Na'mat, the Washington bureau chief for the London-based Arabic daily Al Hayat, wrote the other day: ''What is the responsibility of the (Arab) regimes and the official and semiofficial media in the countries bordering Iraq in legitimizing the operations that murder Iraqis? Isn't their goal to thwart (the emergence of) the newborn democracy in Iraq so that it won't spread in the region?'' (Translation by Memri.)
In identifying the problem, though, Na'mat also identifies the solution. If you want to stop a wave of suicide bombing, the likes of which we are seeing in Iraq, it takes a village. I am a big believer that the greatest restraint on human behavior is not laws and police, but culture and religious authority. It is what the community, what the village, deems shameful. That is what restrains people. So how do we get the Sunni Arab village to delegitimize suicide bombers?
Inside Iraq, obviously, credible Sunni Baathists have to be brought into the political process and constitution-drafting, as long as they do not have blood on their hands from Saddam's days. And outside Iraq, the Bush team needs to be forcefully demanding that Saudi Arabia and other key Arab allies use their media, government and religious systems to denounce and delegitimize the despicable murder of Muslims by Muslims in Iraq.
If the Arab world, its media and its spiritual leaders, came out and forcefully and repeatedly condemned those who mount these suicide attacks, and if credible Sunnis are given their fair share in the Iraqi government, I am certain a lot of this suicide bombing would stop, as happened with the Palestinians. Iraqis themselves would pass on the intelligence needed to prevent these attacks, and they would deny the suicide bombers the safe houses they need to succeed.
That is the only way it stops, because we don't know who is who. It takes the village - and right now the Sunni Arab village needs to be pressured and induced to restrain those among them who are engaging in these suicidal murders of innocents.
The best way to honor the Quran is to live by the cherished values of mercy and compassion that it propagates.
Excuse me, but WHICH "cherished values of mercy and compassion" is Friedman referring to? I must have lost the page in the Koran where it says this.
"If the Arab world, its media and its spiritual leaders, came out and forcefully and repeatedly condemned those who mount these suicide attacks, and if credible Sunnis are given their fair share in the Iraqi government, I am certain a lot of this suicide bombing would stop, as happened with the Palestinians. "
Duh, everyone in the world can see this except leaders of Muslim countries. As the article says, they prefer to see democracy stomped down rather than see it spread to their own countries.
But it's only a matter of time - you a-holes in charge in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Yemen, Sudan, etc. are right to squirm. Get on the Democracy bus or be run over by it.
Why is this fellow looking for consistance of the part of Muslims?
Is he just kidding himself?
"Get on the Democracy bus or be run over by it."
You wish.
Islam and Democracy is an oxymoron. You haven't heard the last of Iraq. Lived in Saudi Arabia for many years; can't see that country ever becoming a Democracy.
I know its there. The MSM says its there.
I know its there. The MSM says its there.
Now on the other hand, Christians and Jews are pure evil. The Old and New Testaments, and Torah are both filled with hate and murder. [sarcasm off]
"If the Arab world, its media and its spiritual leaders, came out and forcefully and repeatedly condemned those who mount these suicide attacks, "
The author comes off as incredibly stupid and uninformed.
Why write something so characterless.
I'm going to barnes & nobles, to buy a Koran.
Then defecate on it.
The Muslim world seems to go on forever without introspection. "Whatever Allah wills".
Such stupidity absorbing so much bravery, it is a shame.
What is Friedman smoking?
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