Ft. Hood, III

Further thoughts...

Natural enough to feel suspicion of an ethnic or cultural group that is mostly in the news when one of it's members does something terrible.  Having grown up in Detroit, I was around folks of Middle Eastern--Arabic, Lebanese--descent enough that names like Hadad and Badeen were common.  When my grandmother went to work at Chrysler's Hamtramck Assembly Plant (still known as Dodge Main, even though they tore it down) all the signs were in English and Polish; when I worked summers there in college, the children of those Poles were middle and upper management, and the signs on the line were in English and Arabic.

I suppose that people from around here--here here, the Puget Sound region--who went to school with kids named Ishihara and the like, were confused when they were torn from their land and sent off to a concentration camp someplace, and their farms turned over to someone else.

Almost as confused as my own ancestors must have been 20-odd years earlier to realize that, having German last names, they were assumed to be in sympathy with the Kaiser...  (Which was probably not as severe as long as they stayed in Michigan.  Family heirlooms include marriage certificates, from a church in Detroit, written in German.  In his masterful history of the US military in WWI, The Doughboys, Laurance Stallings says that the Kaiser's forces considered it most unfair that Doughboys would speak perfect German but still kill them with as much enthusiasm as any other American...)

While there have been some Muslim groups that have deplored terrorist actions, they don't get a lot of press; the ones who celebrate them get all the attention.  Is this because more Muslims support terrorism, or because it makes better "news-ertainment" to show them dancing and singing and celebrating American deaths?  (Or, maybe, as some have suggested, it's because the media Hate America too.) 

Seems to me it would behoove the pro-peace and brotherhood Muslim community to start getting in the faces of those who cry "Death To The Great Satan!", especially the domestic ones. 

If, that is, they really want to be accepted as a legitimate part of American society.  We can handle those who are "different", but there are certain minimum standards, and killing your neighbors, or tolerating those who do, are not to standard.

On the other hand, those who say that "Islam is inherently evil" need to articulate why.  What makes Islam different from other religions?  And is what you object to inherent to the religion, or is it a separate cultural construct, an "added option"?  Many of the ways in which Muslim society tends to oppress women, for example, are not actually based on things which are stated explicitly in the Koran.  (Although some of the things we find hateful are.)

Maybe you feel that any religion is evil?  Debatable--and a debate I have no desire to participate in--although I have to admit that the idea of telling other people what and how to believe and act could be considered to be wrong, but then where do you draw the line?  How do you feel about Sufi's, who are generally more easy going about matters of conscience and the like--more tolerant--than Shi'ites or Sunnis?

It is quite possible that in 100 years the United States will look back on this issue as being on par with the earlier "Yellow Peril", or, for that matter, the way the Irish were treated before the Civil War.  Although, again, I feel that the Muslim community needs to speak out more if it wants to be accepted as not supporting Radical Wahabbists, Islamo-Fascists, or any form of terror.