My outgoing emails suddenly disconnected with the internet, so sat in
my outbox. I tried sending them a few times, rebooted, etc. Nada. I finally
got through to Earthlink yesterday afternoon and was informed the whole
system had a problem 'which would soon be corrected.' Indeed.
Here's the short, impressive mid-morning essay I'd have sent earlier.
Ed
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/ground_zero_for_tolerance_20100817/
Ground Zero for Tolerance
By Robert Scheer
Truthdig: August 17, 2010
Are the Republicans terminally stupid or are they just playing the dangerous
fool? In either case, the irrational attack on Muslims everywhere by the
GOP's
leadership is not only deeply subversive with regard to the American ideal
of religious tolerance but also poses a profound threat to our national
security. Nor does it help that some top Democrats like Harry Reid are
willing to demean Muslims even as we fight two wars in which victory depends
on our ability to convey a respect for their religion.
Just ask Gen. David Petraeus, who is leading the war without end to win the
hearts and minds of Muslims in Afghanistan, how helpful it is to the Taliban
for American politicians to identify all Muslims with terrorism. Or to the
theocratic leaders of Iran who justify their hard line with the insistence
that the U.S. is obsessively anti-Muslim.
Demonization of the Muslim religion is what this brouhaha is all about. Talk
of the sensitivity of the victims of 9/11, ignoring those who were Muslim,
is just camouflage. It is as absurd as it would be to blame all religious
Jews for the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, killed
by one gunman from a fanatical Jewish fringe group, or to ban the erection
of an Orthodox synagogue anywhere near Rabin's grave. As irrational an act
of scapegoating as blaming all ethnic Germans for the acts of Nazis, many of
whom claimed to be God-fearing Christians.
Yet that is the logical implication of the comparison that Newt Gingrich
made when he likened the proposed erection of a Muslim community center two
blocks from the World Trade Center site to putting a Nazi sign next to the
Holocaust Museum. On his website, Newt goes further in identifying all
Muslims with terrorism: "There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New
York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia. The
time for double standards that allow Islamists to behave aggressively
towards us while they demand our weakness and submission is over."
Consider the full implication of that call for an international cold war
against Islam by the former GOP House speaker. Someone should remind Newt
that both Republican and Democratic presidents have regarded Saudi Arabia as
an ally in the war against terrorism and toward that end sanctioned the sale
of very sophisticated weaponry to the kingdom and the sharing of
intelligence with its military. So too with the Muslim-dominated government
of Pakistan with which we have been allied for a half-century, not to
mention our current Muslim allies in power in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a
leader in Congress, Gingrich supported those policies, but now in his zeal
to misrepresent President Barack Obama's perfectly sensible stand that we
are not at war with the Muslim world, he abandons not only his record but
also any pretense of logic.
But even if one accepts that the Wahhabi version of Islam dominant in Saudi
Arabia helps fuel violent spinoffs of the Osama bin Laden variety (although
bin Laden would be summarily executed in his native land), what does this
have to do with a Sufi Muslim community center proposed for lower Manhattan?
As the highly regarded religion writer William Dalrymple pointed out in a
New York Times Op-Ed piece, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the leader of the group
hoping to build the New York center, is a moderate Sufi, and he and his
movement's espousal of universal brotherhood have been a target of violence.
The Taliban was so threatened by the Sufi message of universal love that it
attacked a Pakistani shrine to the great 17th century Sufi poet-saint Rahman
Baba. "I am a lover, and I deal in love," Dalrymple writes in citing Baba's
revered Sufi verse, which continues, "Sow flowers,/ so your surroundings
become a garden./ Don't sow thorns; for they will prick your feet./ We are
all one body./ Whoever tortures another, wounds himself."
Just the message most relevant to adorn a building near the site of the
World Trade Center, leveled by those who sow thorns. But sadly the thorns of
religious bigotry are not a monopoly of any one religion or easily resisted
by the demagogic politicians who exploit our ignorance of the other. The
premise of our constitutional protection of religious diversity is that
ignorance is the enemy of freedom.
Our founders were keenly aware, from the lessons of Europe and the early
American colonies, of the dangers posed by false prophets from within their
own churches. They knew well from deep personal experience, as is revealed
clearly in the writings of Washington and Jefferson, that religious and
political liberty was most effectively threatened by the zealotry of one's
own kin.
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