Fareed Zakaria of CNN has a must see hour special that seeks
to explain why “they hate us”, to answer a puzzle. Why are the jihadi Muslims killing mostly
Muslims as well as some of us? He concludes
that these radical terrorists are at war with the modern world and all who
embrace it. This also might explain why nightclubs in Paris and the gay night club in Orlando were chosen for
terrorist acts. Embedded in Zakaria’s special is that it all began in Greeley,
Colorado, and the top Al Qaeda English language recruiter was a student at
Colorado State University and a former resident of Denver.
The
modern seeds of a revolt had already been planted in Greeley in
1947 per Zakaria. An Egyptian foreign student with beliefs firmly
immersed in traditional Islam attended a church dance was appalled by all the bare skin, tight fitting
dresses, and close up dancing. He
returned home, and wrote a series of books which exhorted a return to Sharia
law and traditional Islamic values as practiced in the 8th century. That resonated with an older Islamic movement
of Wahhabism. Its clerics cherry picked
verses in the Koran (which had contradictory passages, as well) to foster a
belief in a return to Islam as practiced
in medieval times and exhorted killing those who did not follow their religious
interpretation, including Muslims . Zakaria believes that a small percentage of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims are
followers of this interpretation. The
movement became the driving ideology
behind ISIS , al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
A New Mexico
born Muslim student at Colorado State University visited post- Soviet invasion
Afghanistan and was appalled by the poverty and conditions. He became the American voice of al- Qaeda recruitment, Anwar al Awlaki. While he was killed in Yemen by US strikes,
as was his Denver born son, his voice lives on in al -Qaeda’s recruiting
videos.
I am not
surprised with Zakaria’s conclusion. In
1959, during spring break travels in my junior year abroad in Berlin, I took a
trip throughout all of what was then Yugoslavia, and I became fascinated with
a culture, the moderate, westernized Turkish oriented
Muslims in Bosnia, once a province of
Turkey and later a separate country. On my return to Northwestern University in
spent my senior year learning more about the modernization of a secular Turkey,
on Islam, and the impact on people who were struggling within themselves to
become part of the modern world. We concluded the religion was locked into very conservative traditional values. Sometime in the future, there would be a
revolt against all things Western.
But
Islam is not the only religion in revolt against modern society. So are
fundamentalist movements in Christianity
and Judaism, as Karen Armstrong wrote in 2000 in “A Battle for God”. Donald
Trump, who wants to make American Great Again, has tapped into that yearning
for the old order while using bigotry
and racism to make his point.
American
security depends upon cooperation of the 3.3 million Muslims in the United States and our Arab
allies abroad. We should not fall for
hate speech that paints all Muslims with the same brush. Such rhetoric
is harmful for our national security as former CIA director Michael
Hayden said, Trump’s rhetoric has “already made America less safe”.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/mar/29/michael-hayden-ex-cia-director-donald-trump-alread/
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