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The Day - September 24, 2005
The Real Double Standard On Islam
By HASSAN FOUDA
The Day's recent July 20 editorial castigating the worldwide Muslim community for its failure to condemn the terrorist attacks in London was not surprising. Over the past week, The Day's editorial pages have been littered with similar sentiments expressed by the usual suspects demanding apologies from every Muslim in the world for the crimes of a few.
Columnist Thomas Friedman wrote in your pages “it is essential that the Muslim world wake up to the fact that it has a jihadist death cult in its midst,” and insisted that “no major Muslim cleric or religious body has issued a fatwa condemning Osama bin Laden.” Like your editorial, Charles Krauthammer recounted in gory detail the murder of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh by Mohamed Bouyeri, a Moslem, concluding that Europe has “incubated ... an enemy within,” and demanding that Moslems denounce “not just...the terrorist attacks, but their source.”
Offering a spirited defense of torture of Muslim detainees and condemnation of any protests this might arouse, Cal Thomas accused “The MuslimWorld,” collectively, of a double standard. In the same vein, yet producing no examples or data, The Day accused Muslims around the world of “giving a wink and a nod” to terrorism.
As University of Michigan professor Juan Cole noted in a recent article (www.juancole.com/2005/07/friedman-wrong-about-muslims-again-and.html), the worldwide Muslim community has in fact been unambiguous in its condemnation of terrorism. Every major Islamic authority including Sheik Mohamed Sayyid Tantawi of the Al-Azhar Seminary in Cairo, the highest moral authority on the Sunni branch of Islam, has issued repeated condemnations of Osama bin Laden.
At the other end of the spectrum of Islam, nearly all of the major Shiite clerics have condemned bin Laden, such as Ayatollah Muhamed Husain Fadlallah of Lebanon. And, putting the lie to Friedman's claims, the Islamic Council of Spain, a body representing about 250,000 Spanish Muslims, has issued a fatwa against bin Laden.
Yet, mimicking classic anti Semitic stereotypes, and in spite of any facts, Muslims are repeatedly accused of disloyalty and collective responsibility for crimes, and referred to as the enemies of civilization, incubators of evil forces which must be destroyed by the self anointed civilized world. Muslim women wearing traditional dress are routinely faced with cries of “terrorist” as they walk the streets, with a 1,600 percent increase in anti Muslim hate crimes in the pasts few years. A recent Washington Post article quotes Colorado congressman Tom Tancredo as saying that “if this [London bombing] happens in the United States, and we determine that it is the result of extremist, fundamentalist Muslims, you know, you could take out their holy sites.”
Last year, without a thread of indiscretion, self proclaimed “terrorism expert” Daniel Pipes, who has in the past called the American Muslim community “a seditious conspiracy aimed at undermining American values” and warned Americans of “the massive immigration of brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and maintaining different standards of hygiene,” suggested the possibility of detaining Muslims in internment camps like those used against Japanese Americans in World War II. Rather than publicly denouncing Pipes, President Bush appointed him to the United States Institute of Peace, calling him a “respected scholar.”
It is interesting to contrast the accusations against Muslims resulting from Theo Van Gogh's murder with the coverage of convicted killer Eric Rudolph, a Christian fundamentalist who called it his “moral duty” to kill abortion doctors. Where was The Day's editorial calling for swift denunciation by Christian leaders? Why are Muslims alone repeatedly called upon to repudiate violence by other Muslims when no other religion is collectively blamed for the actions of a few? Every act of malfeasance committed by Muslims is adduced as proof of the sinister nature of Islam, with every Muslim, perceived to now be a suspect, required to “speak up.” I defy Cal Thomas, who is an evangelical Christian, to cite even one example of his own past condemnation of violence committed by Christians.
I defy Charles Krauthammer to cite any instance in which he has condemned torture and ethnic cleansing practiced by Israel over the past 60 years against the rest of the Middle East. During Israel's two-decade-long occupation of southern Lebanon, Israeli forces murdered over 20,000 Lebanese and Palestinians, including more than 1,000 in a single day in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, overseen by none other than then Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon. During this time, The Day did not write one editorial demanding an apology from the Jewish community at large for Israel's crimes, and President Bush today has the audacity to call Ariel Sharon a “man of peace.”
Yet Muslims alone are burdened by a collective responsibility. Wherever there are Muslims, they are guilty until proven innocent, terrorists until they have sufficiently proven otherwise. This is the real double standard on Islam. And this is the reason The Day should diversify its commentary, rather than joining the onslaught of the anti-Muslim writers who regularly appear on its pages.
Hassan Fouda lives in Groton.
http://www.theday.com/eng/web/news/re.aspx?re=01FA6AB7-0B54-4AA3-B880-CC8808C00A76
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