Thoughts immediately after 11 September 2001
On 13 September 2001 I wrote:
As the unwilling Roman Empire of these times, we need to work through our sadness and our anger and set in place the resolve to fight these high-tech barbarians for another Hundred Years War, not for just a few months of or two or three years. As we engage in this long-term war:

• We must not persecute Arab-Americans, be they Christian, Muslim, or secular.

• We must guard against those anti-Semites who insist that the United States is the target only because of its support of Israel. At the same time, we must make sure we do not permit Israel to use our justifiable concerns about Islamic fundamentalism to give that country carte blanche in the Mideast.

• We must learn to put up with a slightly more authoritarian civil life than we are accustomed to, while continuing to counter any cavalier attempts by government to use the crisis to impose unnecessary restrictions or as a pretense for martial law.

Now, in February 2006, my thoughts and feelings remain the same. Here, some updated impressions.

• The fight against Islamic fundamentalists, whether they be religiously or politically motivated, is indeed a multi-generational war. Wherever it is to be fought -- Iraq is merely one "theater" in a multi-theater war -- the Islamists are willing to die to defeat us and some of us must die to defeat them. Wishing otherwise won't make it go away.

• Far, far short of deserting Israel, the United States must make it clear that our country will not automatically approve or defend every Israeli geopolitical effort. Just as does Israel, we must put our interests first, even if that means occasionally siding with Arabs or Europeans with whom we otherwise disagree.

• The fights for and against the Patriot Act and about wire-tapping are exactly as they should be: The security-first people and the civil rights-people are having at each other and reaching dynamic consensus -- "dynamic" meaning, we continue to monitor and modify as needed.

Moderate Muslims finally speak up -- 2
Soon after some moderate American Muslims made a statement that took issue with the use of Islam as an excuse for terrorism, others in the Muslim community suggested that the statement wasn't forceful enough, that it seemed designed more" toward improving the faith's image" than in staring an extended discussion about Islamic teaching. Open debate within the Muslim community will prove helpful. One Muslim organization which endorsed the anti-terrorism fatwa, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, has an excellent website which is of interest for anyone concerned about the debate. See www.cair-net.org. 

Koran vs Bible re violence
The majority of moderate Muslims in the world, soon, must make it clear that they oppose Islamist terrorism. "Tut, tut," isn't enough to head off a threatening world-wide religious war or a West-East "clash of civilizations." 

Not that the West is always noble and pure. Catholics and Moslems have massacred each other; Catholics and Protestants have massacred each other; Protestants have massacred Protestants. Catholics have massacred Catholics.

One need only glance through the Bible's Book of Joshua to find apparently God-ordered slaying of women and children, even after a battle has been won. As do Jews and Christians about the Bible, Muslims tend to dismiss some of the Koran's violent passages as "of those times" and as being no longer relevant.

Agnostics and atheists dismiss both holy books as being full of superstitious nonsense. Not content simply to dismiss, some nonreligious folk attack:

"For in the end, an increasing number of serious students [of Hebrew and Greek] began to appreciate the Old Testament as a singularly interesting book, but containing such dreadful and blood-curdling tales of cruelty, greed, and murder that it could not possibly have been inspired and must, by the very nature of its contents, be the product of a people who had still lived in a state of semi-barbarism."

That evaluation appears in the 1925 book, Tolerance, by Hendrik Van Loon, then-popular American historian and journalist. What today would be called a secular humanist, Van Loon said both Catholics and Protestants were both right and wrong in the arguments and wars which followed Luther. . . that the Bolsheviks who overthrew the Czars soon became as arbitrary and cruel as royalty had been . . . that  whereas Socrates had been a man among men, "Plato was afraid of life and escaped from an unpleasant and ugly world into the realm of his own day-dreams."

Returning to Muslim/West relationships, Van Loon recalled that by 636 A.D. "the Mediterranean had been turned into a Moslem lake," essentially putting the European continent  "in a state of siege which lasted until the end of the seventeenth century."

Let's see now: today's Islamists  hate the United States and the West because . . . The Crusaders tried to recapture the Holy Land . . . Spain drove the Moors out of Granada . . . America defeated the Barbary pirates . . .  America continues its knee-jerk support of Israel . . . France and Europe colonized so much of Africa and the Mideast . . . Clinton saved Muslim lives in the Balkans . . . Bush, the First, restored Kuwait's independence after Saddam torched that country's oil fields . . . Bush, the Second, counterattacked  after Nine-Eleven and continues the fight in Afghanistan, Iraq, all over . . . or just because they choose to follow those "irrelevant" violent passages in the Koran.

Moderate Muslims, speak out! -- 04 August 2005

[One day after this article was drafted, a council of American Muslims said Islamist terrorists are "criminals, not martyrs": the next day an Iraqi-American called for a "Million Muslim March"; and the day after that the top Islamic cleric in Egypt denounced terrorism. Finally, moderate Muslims are speaking up.]

'Our culture is better.'

Related VersagiVoice Writings

It helps to keep in mind that the major divisions within Islam may be thought of as:
     Sunni = Roman Catholics
     Shi'a = Protestants
     Wahabite = Puritans

Anti-U.S. terrorism began in 1979

God give us courage & patience

The liberation of Jerusalem

On the war in Iraq

Islam: then and now
"One of the most interesting histories of what comes of rejecting science we may see in Islam, which in the beginning received, accepted, and even developed the classical legacy. For some five or six centuries there is an impressive Islamic record of scientific thought, experiment, and research, particularly in medicine. But then, alas! the authority of the general community, the Sunna, the consensus -- which Mohammed the Prophet had declared would always be right -- cracked down. The Word of God in the Koran was the only source and vehicle of truth. . . . Islamic science and medicine came to a standstill and went dead; and with that, Islam itself went dead." --Joseph Campbell in his book Myths To Live By.

The New Crusades are here
Militant Islamists, may Allah curse them, have made it clear that there is no foreseeable end to their jihad against The Great Satan and the West in general. I take them at their word. We're in it for hundreds of years. At least the next 20 U.S. Presidents, whatever their party or other responsibilities, will be fighting an ongoing War on Terror.

For the legalistic mind which is uncomfortable using the term "war" without applying the "rules of war," labeling the fight a New Crusade frees us to follow the civil rights-based BAMN philosophy. By Any Means Necessary frees us to adopt flexible, and inconsistent, policies and practices: whom we fight, where we fight, when we fight, how we fight.  For us it isn't a religious battle, because the bad guys really don't care whether we are Catholic, Protestant, nondenominational Christian, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, secular humanist, atheist, or nonmilitant Muslim. We are all infidels -- in their meaning of "nonbelievers."

And they are never going to stop trying to destroy us in their effort to achieve their goal of a sharia-based worldwide empire. Technological improvements, especially in transportation and communication, have served militants well. There is no hope of "winning their hearts and minds," and it is both shortsighted and cowardly to pretend otherwise.

Let our self-declared eternal enemies hear that we, too, are ready for generations of non-conventional combat. The Geneva Convention remains in place for any offensive or defensive or preemptive war between uniformed opponents from recognized countries.