Posted on 06/19/2002 3:17:46 PM PDT by swarthyguy
First, understand what I'm NOT saying. I'm not saying I'm a great columnist. I'm not even saying I'm a good columnist.
I'm saying only that I've been writing columns for some publication or other since 1950. Thousands of them.
And I'm saying nothing I've ever written has ever caused me more pain than this one.
Among the things that give me maximum pleasure in the world are my children, football, North Carolina barbecue, Polish music, skinny blondes, and brotherhood.
Yes, brotherhood. I quite literally weep with joy at stories of courageous whites preventing white haters in the South from lynching blacks, Ukrainian farmers risking their lives to hide Jews from the Nazis, Serbian monks protecting ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, Greeks and Turks selling hot dogs together from street carts in New York.
Freaky? Maybe. But, maybe not. Some people like all that sexy stuff. Some like all that violent stuff. Some like all that expensive stuff. I just happen to like all that brotherly stuff.
As a senior at the University of North Carolina in 1952 I led the successful fight to desegregate Kenan Stadium; and that was long before you got hugged by Hollywood movie stars or quoted in Newsweek for such activities that far South.
The French leader who handed Algeria its independence after World War II had better damned well be a tough French nationalist with a good war record. And he was: Gen. Charles DeGaulle. The American president who popped up in Beijing to open relations with communist China in the middle of the Cold War against communism had better damned well be a tough anti-communist, and not some soft-on-communism Democrat. And he was: Richard Nixon.
And you'd better have a thick scrapbook of brotherly deeds before you wonder out loud whether the "brotherhood" you've spent your life promoting and practicing is still appropriate to the Moslem world.
Brotherhood, morally correct back then, may actually be suicidal now. Throughout all our wars we've had people in America who were "of" the enemy; born of the enemy, descendants of the enemy, sympathetic with the enemy, enamored with the enemy, even willing to fight and die for the enemy.
But it never amounted to much. If any Hispanics residing in America made trouble for America during the Spanish-American War, history hasn't told us about it. During World War I we had a good-sized German population, but no major problems of sabotage or disloyalty. In fact, America's greatest air ace of that war was the enfabled German-American Eddie Rickenbacker.
In World War II we had Germans who up, the instant we went to war against Germany, admired Adolf Hitler, Italians who admired Mussolini, and Japanese who were overawed by the military power of their native Japan.
But when the war started, they all proved they were reliable Americans by a majority so overwhelming that the remainder gave us nothing to talk about.
And there's nothing strange about that. The only force tugging against their loyalty to America was their nationalism. And that little "hometown" tug was easily overcome by their awareness that America's democracy trumped the fascism of their homelands.
Today is different.
Islamic Antagonism
Today we have millions of residents, many if not most American citizens, who have, not a nationalistic, but a RELIGIOUS antagonism toward America. The Germans, Italians, and Japanese in America during World War II had zero RELIGIOUS hatred of America.
Islam does.
And all attempts by my brother "brotherhoodists" to spin that reality away are so futile they've been largely abandoned. Too much is now known of what's taught in the "madrassas," Islamic religious schools. Too much is known about what's preached in the mosques and spread through the Moslem media.
Right after 9-11 I, too, instinctively wanted to believe the terrorists were merely an aberrational few and that most Moslems, certainly in America, were little more than Catholics with a different doctrine, Jews with slightly darker complexions, or Presbyterians who wrote from right to left whose men preferred facial hair and whose women covered their heads differently.
Before 9/11 my brotherly intuition left me to assume the little Mustafas of Dearborn, Mich., and the little Achmeds of Alabama were patted on their backs by their proud fathers for learning to recite the Bill of Rights and urged by their mothers to hurry up and learn the Preamble to the Constitution.
Sorry. Not sarcastically sorry; I'm genuinely sorry.
Islam's religious antagonism to American political and social values is as powerful as it is primitive. Thomas Jefferson's sparkling exhortations in favor of democracy bounce like BBs off the thick armor of fundamentalist Islam – especially the kind of hateful, fundamentalist Islam force-pumped into those American mosques financed by the Wahabi sect of Saudi Arabia.
(What percentage of American mosques are financed by Saudi Arabia? The common figure most often heard is 50 percent!)
In World War II, Lutheran clergymen with German congregations in America never once said, "We must undermine America for our beloved Fuhrer Adolf Hitler. Catholic priests in Italian parishes never once said, "America is decadent, and we must bring it down for our beloved Duce, Benito Mussolini." And Japanese-American troops, called "nisei," demoralized their German foes in Italy with their combat ferocity.
Mosques all over America, however, are echo chambers for the Wahabi line. And it's pretty awful.
'America Is the Enemy'
"America is the enemy. Unbelievers in Islam deserve death. We must work with our Islamic brothers for Jihad! There is no higher distinction than martyrdom against the infidels who despoil our sacred soil with their unbelieving feet and aid the wretched Jew in their usurpation of our holy territory."
Heady stuff!
What gives me the right to worry about the octane of our Moslem countrymen's loyalty?
I glide easily to such concerns without infiltrating a mosque, purloining confidential documents from any Islamic organization, swallowing one drop of propaganda from Moslem-bashers, or wire-tapping a single imam.
All I had to do was observe the American Islamic reaction to 9-11. Or, heartbreakingly enough, the lack thereof.
Spiders weave webs. Beavers build dams. Humans react. The entire global Jewish community reacted instantly and thunderously denounced the crazed Jewish settler in Hebron who entered a mosque and slaughtered 50 or more Moslems at prayer. America instantly and thunderously denounced the accidental destruction of an Iranian civilian plane by an American military ship in the Persian Gulf.
Israel denounced its own assassination of an innocent Moroccan Arab in Lillehammar, Norway, who was catastrophically mistaken for one of the terrorists who murdered the Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich.
Listen now to the Moslem community of America. Listen closely!
Since Sept. 11, 2001 we've heard not one single, rousing, convincing, united blanket denunciation of the terror attack from the American Islamic community. Neither have we heard any rousing, convincing, etc. pro-American declaration from that community since that tragic date.
Everything we've heard is defensive. "Islam is a peaceful religion." "You can't indict our whole group because of a few terrorists." "You cannot discriminate against us because of our ethnicity or religion." "You are PROFILING!"
Agreed! But where are the ringing affirmations that they, the American Muslims, join the rest of us in victimhood and outrage against the attackers? Where is their proactive demand that all who commit such attacks be extirpated and annihilated?
If you put that question to "Islamic spokesmen" in the United States they will quickly furnish you with the names of prominent Moslems here and there who protested and a mosque or two in Jersey City and Sacramento that, indeed, issued supportive statements. But there's no political stethoscope powerful enough to detect any real fury palpitating behind the breast-bones of American Moslems, at least not fury against the terrorist attackers.
Am I asking too much when I expect just as much anti-terrorist, pro-American solidarity from the Islamic community as I do from the Protestant, Catholic and Jewish communities? Is it too much to ask the same sentiment from American Palestinians, Egyptians, Saudis, Jordanians, Iraqis, etc. as I do from Americans of every other national origin?
The muted and ambiguous murmur we do hear from our American Moslems makes me feel rather like the president of a corporation in the hospital who gets a note from the chairman of the board stating, "I have been authorized by the board of directors to wish you a speedy recovery – by vote of five to four!"
My lifelong friends in the "Brotherhood Caucus" try to restrain me. "Relax!" they counsel. "These people are shy. They're new here. They don't know how to react yet. It's not their style or tradition to protest or picket, or hold up placards, or even speak out loud."
That placated me for a while; but suddenly the American Moslems proved they did, indeed, have a voice; a loud one at that, that needed no coaxing.
Any shyness that might have prevented American Moslems from locking arms, hearts, and voices with other Americans after 9-11 vanished when the Israeli military entered Ramallah and Jenin to root out the terrorist bomb factories and suicide-homicide schools (operating, incidentally, quite openly inside refugee camps run by the United Nations!)
It was comforting to learn our American Moslems have a voice. It was disappointing to learn that voice is raised, not when their co-religionists attack America, but only when their co-religionist murderers face obliteration at the hands of Israelis seeking self-defense.
I'm an American who believes in God, seeks to serve his fellow man, likes a drink, and, though occasionally glancing at graven images of scantily clad women in our culture, wishes there were fewer.
If my lifestyle is punishable, I want it to be punished by the Almighty Himself when He decides to render judgment upon me personally; and not by those living in the most God-kissed country on earth who quietly cheer the monsters of 9-11 and denounce those who interfere with their U.N.-sheltered murderers of innocent soldiers, men, women, and children. I write this, not in hatred, but in disappointment; not in anger, but dismay.
Hello, Moslems of America! Do you really want to remain the only group in our history who said "No, thanks" to our values, our openness, our eagerness to include, our democracy, and our willingness to make people as different as you are from us?
In my lifetime, Americans of German, Italian and Japanese extraction cheered as their "terrorists" were defeated and our American values replaced the tyrannies of their long-tortured homelands.
I want to live long for many reasons; and among them is the desire to be there when we can lift a glass together – fruit juice for you, vodka-on-the-rocks for me – to celebrate the triumph of democracy in every single nation in the Moslem world.
Yes, islam just wants to be our friend. You are getting sleepy.... sleeeepy....
You need to grow up....
That you had this reaction only upon learning that this murderer of 3000 innocent people had an alcoholic drink speaks volumes about your faith.
Nor do I, for I don't believe they exist, your protests to the contrary notwithstanding.
If muslims want hate they're going to get it in spades!
...you cannot be trusted, because your koran tells you that all non-islamics are to be reverted or killed. Mr Farber is, unfortunately (as he laments, himself!), correct in his assessment.
My experience, gleaned primarily from living for 7 months in Iran back in the 70's, is that one-on-one y'all are OK. In a group, however, y'all are dangerous, even to yourselves.
I, like Mr Farber, am sorry to have to take this postition but, like the doctor husband character opposite Sally Fields in "Not without my daughter" (a movie - true story - about an American woman married to an Iranian muslim medical doctor who studied and matriculated here in the US), once you are surrounded by your "homies", you revert to the oppressive and violent rules called out by the koran.
Can you say, unequivocally and without reservation, and swear it before your allah, in public, that you would fight for this country or for your neighbor against an islamist jihad?
Better yet, let's just hear you go ahead and make said vow, and keep your hands where we can see them so we can tell you aren't crossing your fingers at the time! In fact, why aren't American muslims, like the American Germans, Italians, and Japanese during WWII, as described factually by Mr Farber, making this promise accross the board and freely? Where are the islamists true loyalties?
Unfortunately, and I truly wish this was NOT the case, I think the answer to that lies in the 9/11 experience, not in the fine-sounding words of one individual muslim not surrounded by his homies!
To all non-islamics anywhere in the world, here's my advice: Stay vigilent and stay armed!
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