When calamity struck the Twin Towers on Sept. 11, I was on my way from my ranch in Ignacio back to my day-job in Oregon, listening to the unfolding horror on a fading KSUT somewhere this side of Cortez. What struck me most about the early reports was their muted, matter-of-fact ring: Those guys didn’t hit New York, they hit us. All of us, Indian, Spanish, Anglo, were in their gunsights now, together. We needed to wake up, get real, get things done.
Together.
For the next three weeks, I listened to the loose talk on the university circuit. I listened to three incoherent creeds whose divorce from reality was truly astounding:
“Blame America” (this one from my hectoring ex-teacher Noam Chomsky): Yes, Sept. 11 was a real atrocity, but we deserve it, our karma is catching up with us – Vietnam, Cambodia, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Clinton’s bombing of Khartoum, Israel’s abuse of the Palestinians.
“Maintain all civil liberties at all costs”: Never mind that liberty on occasion must be defended by force. Never mind that the dead at Ground Zero have been deprived of all liberties.
“Discuss all available options in public”: ad nauseam, a national teach-in, before we dare take any action. Let bin-Laden, al-Qaida and the Taliban get our drift on CNN.
What disturbed me most about those three reflexive mantras was how profoundly detached they were from who the murderous culprits were (14 of the 19 were affluent Saudis) and what really ailed them. So I lost my patience and went public, reminding my colleagues what really drives all fundamentalists bonkers, be they Christian, Jewish, Hindu or Muslim – not what we do but what we are, what we stand for: Our addictive, anarchic freedoms; our confusing diversity; our humanist Renaissance and the Enlightenment; our secularism and separation of church and state that guarantee both religious freedom and the right to disbelieve; our doubting, skeptic science; and last but not least, our liberated women, free to work, free to choose – and yes, free to flaunt their beauty in public.
The ills of fundamentalist Islam are all too easy to spot: Stuck in the Middle Ages, they have missed out on the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and Adam Smith’s Moral Sentiment, where empathy for “the other” is enshrined in prophetic Darwinian natural morality. Easy to spot, but as Christ reminded us: “Why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, but do not consider the plank in your own eye?”
The scriptures of all three Abrahamic religions are loaded to the gills with harsh exclusionist prose. From the Quran: “Woeful punishment awaits the unbelievers.”; “As for the unbelievers ... they shall become the fuel ... beat them and destroy them, and you shall not make peace with them or pity them.”
From the gospels of our very own Prince of Peace: “He who blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is subject to eternal damnation.”
After Paris and San Bernardino, one may as well ask: Is our fundamentalism preferable to theirs? Better still, is there a middle ground between Barack Obama’s bland, benign neglect and Donald Trump’s blunt, in-your-face racism?
Islamic terror is the global outgrowth of a well-entrenched interpretation of Islam – Wahabi Salafism. It has been sponsored by our Saudi oil allies for over a century now and relentlessly exported to the rest of the Islamic world through lavishly-funded Madrassas and “charities.” Both al-Qaida and the so-called Islamic State are the dragon seeds of this extremist, hate-filled interpretation of the Quran.
What makes Islam’s exclusionist, exterminatory scriptures different than ours, it turns out, is our political history since the 1400s: The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, secularism, separation of church and state, pluralism. But this is the same history that our home-grown fundamentalist – be they Christians or Jews – hate and reject but are still bound to abide by – kicking and screaming – as citizens of this great republic. Our immigrant experience is replete with isolationist experiments: The Russian Dukhovors, the German Hutterites, the Amish, the Ultra-Orthodox Jews, the Mormons, the home-schoolers.
Funny thing, though, none of those have ever been implicated in terror. But non-Islamic violence still kills the bulk of our yearly crop of innocent victims: Our gun-craving right-wing nuts, our gun-mad anti-abortion fanatics, our gun-happy crazies, our gun-loving gangs. Mechanized violence, it seems, is as American as God and Mom and Apple Pie.
Multiple generations of immigrants have washed up on our shores. First, they cloistered themselves in ethnic ghettos. Then, mysteriously, they vanished into our proverbial melting pot, adopting our Renaissance-cum-Enlightenment political values. Are our Muslim immigrants different? The vast majority are, surely, not. But a significant minority is, and those are the ones who stay aloof, immerse themselves in medieval scriptures and resonate to the deadly rhetoric of Jihadi Islam.
Is there a sane middle ground in our current predicament with Islam? There is, but it depends largely on Islam itself, both our Muslim communities at home and the global instigators of Wahabi-Salafist Islam abroad. Our anti-terror crusade, if it is ever to succeed, is really up to them. We can be sympathetic partners and facilitators. But if Islam is ever to bid final goodbye to the Middle Ages, it is its believers’ load to bear. It is about their soul.
Tom Givón ranches near Ignacio. His forthcoming novel West of Eden (a Western) is based on a shootout case in southern Arizona in 1918. Reach him at tgivon@uoregon.edu or www.whitecloudpublishing.com.
