The Standard Times editor has apparently jumped on the Terry Jones bandwagon (“Blame violent Islam for deaths”). Not only does the editor appear to share a few of Jones’ own Islamophobic views, he completely misunderstands this as a religious response to the continuing, unwelcome American presence in Afghanistan.
The editor’s last words are: “Let us remember… that Terry Jones might be an irresponsible fool, but he is not responsible for the murder of innocent foreigners in Afghanistan. Those who … practice a faith that they insist commands them to use violence in the service of an angry God are the ones with the blood of innocents on their hands.”
The editor’s use of the words “in the service of an angry God” is horrifying. I doubt he has been trained as a theologian and his inference belies the ignorant Muslim-bashing in vogue today and the rejection of the fact that Muslims worship the same God of Abraham that most Americans do. As for the Angry God, the god of hate is the terracotta idol Reverend Jones apparently worships.
In the 2007 Pew Research study cited in the editorial, “Muslim Americans: Middle Class and Mostly Mainstream” (http://www.pewresearch.org/assets/pdf/muslim-americans.pdf), 26% of American Muslims under 30 did not entirely repudiate suicide bombings as a tactic. Yet in the same study we find that 82% of all American Muslims over 30 see absolutely no justification for it.
But if the editor thinks these figures are “alarming,” let’s look at “mainstream” American values regarding the killing of civilians. I think you’ll see they have nothing to do with religion, but everything to do with politics.
For example, the majority of the American public supported dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Former Secretary of State Madeline Albright told anchorwoman Lesley Stahl that the sanctions-related deaths of half a million Iraqi children were “worth it” in order to apply pressure on Saddam Hussein.
And let’s not forget the numerous Afghan and Pakistani civilians who are “accidentally” murdered by drones as I write this. Or the thousands of Vietnamese who were cremated by napalm air strikes. Or the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians murdered in “Shock and Awe” – all for nothing. Or the millions of civilians we have left to the whims and caprices of homicidal dictators our own State Department supports.
Our disgust for murdering civilians, it would seem, only applies when we aren’t the perpetrator.
We like to pretend we don’t understand why we are despised. Or we come up with ludicrous explanations to delude ourselves. “They hate us for our democracy.” Or “those damned people and their angry god.”
But the real reason they hate us? Because we won’t stop invading their countries or deciding who should run them. The explosion of rage in Afghanistan had nothing to do with Islam and (I’ll agree with the editor here) had less to do with Terry Jones. Following the disclosure of the premeditated murders of Afghan civilians by Cpl. Jeremy Morlock and other U.S. soldiers, the Quran burning was just the latest affront from America – a nation that will never understand why the world doesn’t embrace us with open arms.
Finally, if Terry Jones is an irresponsible fool for his pronouncements on Islam, the editor is as well for echoing his tripe.
This was published in the Standard Times on April 7, 2011
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20110407/opinion/104070323
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