In a New Jersey Star-Ledger guest column, Trump's
unwelcoming message to Muslim Americans like me, Fakhruddin Ahmed wrote:
Muslims immigrate to America not to change the American way of
life but to embrace it. Muslims are attracted to America because of the way it
is; they have no intention of changing or harming America. Muslims know that if
they had settled here first, modern America would probably look like the Middle
East, and would not be a welcoming beacon of freedom and innovation. Few
Muslims dream of emigrating to China or Russia!
Muslims are traversing the same path of hope trodden by millions
of immigrants before them. If President Donald Trump understood these simple
truths, perhaps his misgivings about Muslims would subside.
As more Americans decouple from organized religion and embrace
tribal and racial identities, some fear that Muslims will fill the religious
void. They need not worry. Muslim Americans are following the same trend
that has delivered other religious groups to the doorsteps of secularism.
Ahmed goes on to back up his contention, which I
believe is largely true. I think it’s also largely true that “The overwhelming
majority of Muslims are on America's side as it fights these terrorists.” But
does that invalidate Trump’s (and others’) “rationale for repeatedly brandishing
the phrase ‘radical Islamic terrorism’,” which he say “conflate[s] Islam itself
with terrorism and offend[s] the world's 1.6 billion Muslims who do not see a
link between the two?”
I sympathize with the sentiments expressed here.
Muslim Americans should not be automatically lumped in with and treated like
terrorists.
But there is one glaring problem—Ahmed’s
rejection of the term "radical Islamic terrorism.” It is a serious
mistake, especially for Muslim-Americans, to evade the actual nature of the
terrorist movement, which is precisely motivated by a totalitarian ideology rooted
in the Islamic religion. If this barbaric movement is to be wiped off the face
of the Earth, all people—Muslim and non-Muslim, religionists and atheists—must
properly identify this enemy of civilization.
The Star-Ledger recently ran a guest column by
John Farmer Jr., doing just that. Farmer informed of a new report from the
Bipartisan Policy Center, chaired by Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton of the original
9/11 Commission, which attempted to answer the question of why the Bush
strategy failed. Key quotes from the column:
"For all of its battlefield and intelligence successes,"
the BPC Report notes, "the United States has demonstrated little ability
to degrade support for the ideology underlying jihadist terrorism."
That ideology rejects the idea of a nation state as a western
creation foisted upon Islam by colonial powers. It advocates a world as a
unified caliphate under a single Islamist banner, and rejects utterly the
notion of the separation of church and state, believing that "the Koran is
our constitution" and that religious law should inform all aspects of
daily life.
Just as only Muslims can be effective in countering the Islamist
version of Islam, only America and the west can be effective in countering the Islamist
totalitarian rejection of our freedoms and way of life.
Ayn Rand Institute scholar Elan Journo makes the
same point:
[T]he jihadists have never made their cause secret. Our enemy is
defined, not primarily by their use of terrorist means, but by their
ideological ends. They fight to create a society wherein Islamic religious law,
or sharia, dominates every last detail of every individual’s life, a cause
inspired and funded by patrons such as Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, and above
all, Iran. In our book, we call this political-ideological movement Islamic
totalitarianism.
These are not Anti-Muslim bigots. These are not “Islamophobes.”
These are sober, objective intellectuals. “Radical Islamic terrorism” does not
mean all Muslims. It does properly conceptualize the faction of Islam we are
fighting. Proper identification is the vital prelude to winning. It’s great to
know that “Muslim Americans are following the same trend that has delivered
other religious groups to the doorsteps of secularism.” They must be explicit.
Just as American Christians rejected their totalitarian Inquisitional past by
embracing the separation of church and state, so American Muslims must reject
the totalitarian branch of their religion and explicitly embrace separation of
mosque and state. That will definitively distinguish peaceful Muslims from the
jihadists. Freedom of religion and conscience is a core unifying principle of
all Americans.
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