We Muslims are looking inward after Fort Hood shooting
By Raeed N. Tayeh, November 12, 2009
We must resist a witch hunt in the wake of the Fort Hood killings.
For American Muslims, the Fort Hood massacre is a crisis. There are open calls for a blanket investigation of Muslims in the military and even demands for a ban on Muslims serving in the armed forces.
Not since 9/11 has our faith — and our patriotism — been placed under such a microscope.
At the same time, not since the Twin Towers fell have American Muslims taken such a sobering look in the mirror to try to understand for ourselves why an unassuming member of our community — a doctor and a soldier — might have turned to mass murder, shouting “God Is Great” along the way.
Within hours of the shooting, national Islamic organizations issued unequivocal condemnations of the attack. Whatever the twisted motivations of the shooter, they argued persuasively that nothing in Islam could condone such an atrocity.
Muslim-Americans have struggled mightily over the past eight years to try to explain our faith to anyone who would listen. We do not want all of our efforts to go down the drain at the hands of a psychopathic murderer.
Muslims in the military have worked double time to combat stereotypes, knowing that doubts over their loyalty hang over their heads.
I know of Muslim-Americans who have joined the military, in part, to demonstrate their commitment to this great land. Some of them have made the ultimate sacrifice, such as Navy SEAL Michael Monsoor, who in 2006 threw himself onto a grenade during a firefight in Afghanistan in order to save the lives of his fellow warriors.
Despite our contributions to this country and our efforts to clear the good name of Islam, we have a longer way to go now because of Nidal Hasan. But he is no more representative of Muslim-Americans than Timothy McVeigh was of Christian-Americans. Muslim-Americans should not be blamed for Hasan’s crimes.
Still, Muslims in America would be wise not to ignore the anger and fear that increases, rightly or wrongly, every time a Muslim is implicated in anything that even has the whiff of terror. We also need to continue our internal conversations among Muslims. We need to recognize that many Muslim-Americans may have legitimate grievances with aspects of U.S. policy — whether it is the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, Washington’s blind support of Israel or the practice of extraordinary renditions.
But we must insist that violence is no way to register such grievances. And we must aggressively counter those in our midst who incite hatred and who romanticize militancy.
Our very freedom is at stake.
Raeed N. Tayeh is a writer and political analyst living in North Canton, Ohio. He can be reached at pmproj [at] progressive [dot] org.
Correction:
In Raeed Tayeh’s op-ed, “We Muslims are looking inward after Fort Hood shooting,” there was an error. He described Navy SEAL Michael Monsoor as a Muslim. Monsoor was actually a Christian. The author and the Progressive Media Project apologize for the mistake.
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Comments
Moslems both in this country and around the world need to do much more than Mr. Tayeh suggests above. The internal dialogue they need to have must begin with asking why Moslems are so violent and intolerant in the first place. The argument that not all Moslems are terrorists or fundamentalists or whatever is not nearly enough. Not all white Southerners joined lynch mobs, but what difference did that make in the life of African-Americans in the South before the civil rights revolution? Moslems have been indulging in global terrorism for 40 years - and, yes, the terrorism against Israel also counts. Moslems need to ask why theirs is the only religion left in the world that still kills (en masse, not just isolated sociopaths here) in the name of religion and why vengeance is so prominent a feature of their cultures; they need to question the barbarity of Islamic law, the oppression of women, the moral bankruptcy of their governments, their hysterical sexual repression, 'honor' killings, polygamy, the 72 virgins, fatwas, the whole institution of jihad, the role of their clerics, the willingness of so many of their co-religionists to become kamikazes, their flagrant disregard for the most rudimentary usages of civilized warfare, and the whole belligerent attitude of Islam toward the non-Islamic world. They need to question the spiritual arrogance of their religion, which contains almost no original religious ideas and is in no way an advance over Judaism and Christianity. They need to question their lack of intellectual integrity, as when they deny the Holocaust or charge that Israelis committed the 9/11 atrocity. They need to question why Palestinians were offered a state larger than the one they now claim but have chosen instead to spend over 60 years trying to wipe Israel off the face of the earth (and by their own admission). Moslems need to ask why they cannot get along with any other religious group - Jews, Christians, Hindus, Bahais, Parsis, etc., and why they so often wage bloody internecine campaigns against each other (Sunnis, Shiites, Wahabis). They need to ask why the extremists and terrorists among them are so much more visible, audible and effective than the more civilized majority. Until Moslems ask themselves these and many other related questions instead of always assuming the role of the aggrieved victim whenever their aggression is resisted or when their outrages provoke outrage, Islam will continue to deserve the evil reputation it bears in the rest of the world.