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.
For that reason, I agree with an opinion I read today. We must make the Moslem world aware of a new U.S. policy of MAD (mutually assured destruction). We need to have at least 50% of our strategic nuclear forces targeted on centers of the Muslim world. If a nuke is set off in the U.S., Meca, and all of the major middle eastern cities will be flattened. The same goes for Islamabad, Kurachi, and Lahore in Pakistan. Put the ball in their court. Either they clean up their act, or an escalation of Isamic terrorism will reap a whirlwind of righteous destruction.
I've thought about this one long and hard and I can think of no better alternative. We are fighting evil on a massive scale.
What, both of them?
As an American Muslim, when I read of a skyjacker drinking in a Florida topless bar, I said out loud "that is No True Muslim!"
So it's the topless bar what bothers ya. If the SKYJACKER had instead prayed the night before murdering thousands of people, then his True Muslimness would remain intact in your eyes. Got it.
Yes you are correct they need to do much better. They either don't have the spin machines like CAIR, ISNA, MSA and others do or they are plainly afraid. Just like the editor at Pakistan.Com. These groups almost ran him out of business. They do not have to prove they are Americans. They do have to stand up against the extremists a lot better.
Yet the American Muslims will deny the truth to the end.
And financed to the tune of 40%, incidentally, by the U.S. through the U.N.
Heck there are a lot of non-muslim americans that need to stand up and be counted as well on a number of issues, and they don't either. Moderate Muslims need to do much better. We agree on that. cheers
In an ideal world, no, they wouldn't have to prove they are Americans not the enemy. In the real world, I am sorry, but they do. Just as the Japanese and Germans who lived here during WWII had to prove that they were Americans and not the enemy.
We need deeds not just talk.
It took deeds to turn us against the Muslim world. As a general rule we didn't really believe that they hated us and wanted to kill us.
We believe it now.
If you want us to believe otherwise about some of you then you are going to have to give us deeds as well. It's not fair but the faith, trust and goodwill you had with the non-Muslims in America was seriously overdrawn on 9/11. You will have to build it back again.
a.cricket
I have also read other Islamic documents that are generally withheld from the Moslem world, such as the early writings of the Imam's from Mecca and Medina that held that the holiness of the Dome of the Rock and Mohammed's alleged night ride there were a fiction concocted to pull the people away from the true faith in Mecca and Medina to Jerusalem where the Islamic leaders had built the Dome and invented the fiction of the ride in order to compete with the beauty of the Christian churches of the area. Where in the Koran do we find an account of the holiness of the Dome and the flight to heaven of Mohammed? Could it be that this great religion has men fighting for centuries over a piece of earth that has worth only because the local yokels made up a story to justify the building of a pretty mosque? According to Islam's own historical writings, this is just the case: rivers of blood to justify a lie so that the Christians would not have a church more pretty than the Jerusalem mosque.
Whereas Moslems kill others to spread their religion of peace, Christians die to give testimony to the truth of their faith.
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