Muslim Terror
by Jorge Vargas
"All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood." United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 10 December 1948 (emphasis mine)
We are told that Spain is a nation of the West, that despite its not too distant past of tyranny and oppression, Spain espouses the very ideals of democracy and social development that we in the advanced and modern West adhere to. After all, Spain, like Great Britain, ancient Rome, and Nazi Germany, has played a large role in the creation of this thing that we now call the developed West.
The day was January 8, 2006 and I had entered Barajas International Airport in Madrid, Spain and was clearing customs. A friend of mine, who is of Indian descent, was detained by the Spanish customs officials and thoroughly searched. She is one of the least threatening people I’ve ever encountered; she’s always smiling, but she admits to having the stereotypical ‘Persian nose.’
I’ve heard countless Arab friends joke about the fact that they’re probably on some US government watch-list because they’re Arab or Arab-descended, and my Muslim colleague always asks me if I think that he’ll get in trouble for writing about Islam and will refuse to ever publicly discuss his views of Israeli policy.
After September 11th, 2001, countless AOL chat rooms were packed with patriotic Americans accusing Arabs and Muslims of being ‘sand niggers’ and ‘dirty rag-heads.’ I have vivid memories of CNN presenting images on that day of Palestinians burning American flags labeling those images as the Palestinian reaction to the attacks of that autumn morning – it was later discovered that those images had actually been filmed shortly after an Israeli incursion into the occupied territories and that they were in no way a response to the more than 2,000 individuals who lost their lives that day. This is the CNN that we’re told is the pinnacle of honest American television reporting – which is why I get my news from other, more legitimate and credible sources.
I’ve even heard once that a woman working for an extremely important international organization in New York City was followed home by a man in an overcoat while she was talking on her cell phone, in Arabic, and the man told her that she ‘shouldn’t speak that language, it’s dangerous.’
The cases could fill an entire book.
Both CNN and Mr. George W. Bush – a man whose mistakes and lies have deemed him morally unworthy of having the title of ‘President of the United States of America’– will admit that the Arab World is not a world of terrorists and suicide bombers. Arabs don’t sit around plotting how to blow up office buildings in the United States, and killing Israelis isn’t their favorite pastime.
Those states from which the majority of the terrorists come from are almost all dictatorships: Saudi Arabia (US-sponsored and ARAMCO/US-created), Egypt (US-sponsored) and Syria. The Muslim Brotherhood isn’t, by its very nature, a terrorist organization but it has ties with other fundamentalist terrorist organizations. Why would these fundamentalist organizations thrive in these authoritarian states?
The answer is at once glaringly obvious and yet too difficult for US policymakers to grasp: The only way in which these organizations, which are usually in opposition to the state, can act to follow their inherently political agendas without being obliterated by the state is under the veil of Islam, the only legitimate source of power that is above the state. President Mubarak of Egypt can’t force people out of the mosques because Egypt isn’t superior to Islam and the Prophet Mohammad and Mubarak knows this, which is precisely why the Muslim Brotherhood is allowed to survive.
But that sort of scenario is to be expected under dictatorships. If the only group allowed to operate, albeit unofficially as is the case for Egypt, is hiding under the veil of Islam, it will produce some extremists and these individuals will sometimes drift into terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda, or they will fight alongside groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah for their political cause: the liberation of Palestine.
The case is different in Spain and the United States, both of which are constitutional republics, with all that that status entails. Why are Spanish and US airport security officers constantly discriminating against Muslims and Arabs? Why are hate crimes against Muslims usually overlooked? Why wasn’t CNN accused of falsifying the news and manipulating audiences? If CNN were to show a video of Evangelical Christians burning US flags and that video is later found to be false, we’d raise a cry into the heavens in protest.
The Islamic faith is not violent in its nature. Middle Easterners are as peace-loving as we are, and to an extent probably more so – after all, it’s the United States, Great Britain, Spain and the coalition of the corrupted that invaded Iraq in 2003, not Syria and Iran.
We are human. We can’t be diminished to petty cultural arguments which, at their core, can be reduced to ignorance of the unknown and the inherent human desire to choose and distinguish between the native and the foreign. Arabs aren’t animals. Muslims aren’t murderers. If you want to understand terrorism and if you want to fight terrorism, you’re doing a noble thing, but only if you go about it without discriminating, by treating all as if they were your brothers and your sisters in this large family that goes by the surname of sapien.
There are causes for terrorism and there is a reason why terrorists in the Middle East tend to hide behind the shawl of piety, but Muslims shouldn’t be threatened for speaking Arabic and they shouldn’t have to assume they’re on a terrorist watch-list.
ETA in Spain is a Basque organization, the IRA consists of Catholics, the bomber of Oklahoma City was a Protestant American, and Lori Berenson, an American, is being held in Peru as a proven terrorist.
We’re all human and we all have rights, and the judge of that must be fair, impartial, and wise, otherwise we’ll never rise out of the vicious cycle of violence that is prevalent throughout our planet and that appears to be so inherent in our primitive Western society.
