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The Crusade
By Jamshed Bokhari
28/09/2001
I keep thinking I'll just wake up and it will be over. I'll be out of this daze. The Towers will still be there, the people still alive, and that my neighbors will look at me as they did before then - without the double take, without the hard looks, without the hate.
Nowadays I'm in some sort of bizarre world where everything I thought was stable is not. You hear about how people in Bosnia say that when the civil war started there, people they had lived with their entire life changed. People who were friends and neighbors suddenly turned on them overnight, commenting that they never could have imagined that sort of thing happening to them, there. Now I understand.
I had just entered my teen years when the Iranian hostage crisis occurred, ending junior high and entering high school in Oklahoma, the buckle of the Bible Belt; Tornado Alley; home of that peculiar animal, the Southern Democrat - Republican in outlook, but Democratic because of favorable farming subsidy policies - itself peculiar in that farmers were given incentives (paid) by the government NOT to grow certain crops, in order to control supply, driving market prices up.
But that is another tome.
Into that cauldron, with melanin in my skin and being, God forbid, a "Moslem", I was thrown. And I got grief. But this is different, much worse. Suburban Maryland can proudly claim that it can hold its own with the crimson-necked of the Southwest.
You ask, "How can you be so callous? How dare you talk that way? Shame on you, you just destroyed our country. You deserve it." I answer, "At first I feared the backlash. I kept my family sheltered in my home, with the curtains drawn, for a week. But now… I'm just angry." Sick of the stares, sick of the accusatory glances. Just plain sick of it. You say, "Who cares?" I say, "You should." Because this is not the way it's supposed to be.
From the tragedy, horror and madness of September 11, and onwards, things have spiraled further into even more lunacy. As President George W. Bush, whom American Muslim organizations - our "leadership" - so proudly bragged of electing into office, claims the U.S. is specifically going after those it says are responsible for the attacks, he, conversely, uses words like "crusade" to describe the anticipated onslaught.
Bush either needs to get new advisors or listen to the ones he has, for they would have told him what that word means to Muslims worldwide. In essence, for Muslims, it means the beginning of a campaign to try and annihilate them. With that one word, even after his retraction, Bush effectively declared war on Islam, and not just those specific people he says he is after.
Its one thing for some disturbed individual out in the boonies to kill a grocery clerk because he looks Muslim, or is a "fawiner". Its quite another to make it state policy.
"Bush declared a crusade against Islam" has become the central theme of protestors throughout lands inhabited by Muslims, from Indonesia to Pakistan to Egypt. Groups protesting against any anticipated attack against Muslim countries, notably Afghanistan, constantly refer back to the "crusade" comment.
But Bush is not entirely at fault, he, and other average Americans like him, have been fed a steady diet of false associations from a distorted history and biased media. Age-old West versus East conflicts, Christianity meeting Islam issues and current political realities have shaped how Americans view Islam and Muslims.
Far better qualified individuals than myself make a convincing case attesting to this reality. Edward Said's (a Christian by the way, but an A-rab)
Orientalism is probably the definitive text describing the situation.
When Bush stated in his address to Congress that the attackers were jealous of the U.S.'s democracy and freedom, he knew that to be untrue, but its what an uniformed U.S. audience can understand in order to mobilize armed forces. What Americans and some decision-makers fail to comprehend is that for people and nations outside the U.S., mostly in what was once called the Third World, their definition of American democracy is what
they see of American democracy. And they do not see freedom of speech, they do not see the system of checks and balances, they do not see the open society.
What they see is American foreign policy. For them American foreign policy is American democracy. And the U.S.'s record, if judged on the basis of justice and equity, to put it mildly, has not been good. And most Americans do not realize this, nor do some of them care. As long as the vast American middle class, 80% of the population, has its white picket fence, a two-car garage, and 2.4 kids, they could care less what happens beyond their borders. They are satisfied. And who can blame them/us. If any other people in the world were in that situation, they would behave exactly the same, maybe slightly better, maybe slightly worse.
Into this malaise comes Islam, and perceptions of it. Americans still won't admit publicly what has been ingrained in them from sources like the media, both Hollywood and the news, that the first thing that comes to their mind when the word Islam is mentioned, is terrorism. There, I said it.
You can reason until you are blue in the face about, "I don't blame all of Christianity for Jim Jones or David Koresh. I don't go up to any Christian I see on the street asking them to explain to me why those individuals were responsible for the death of so many people? I don't ask them what in their religion makes them act that way. I don't call Christians terrorists because of this. Likewise, I don't go up to any odd white person asking them to explain to me the actions of Timothy McViegh. Should I start calling all white people terrorists because of McVeigh? Should I go and kill someone in upper management because they are white, or because they just look white?" but it won't matter.
Nobody is listening anyway. They never listened before, why should they listen now? And no one wants to listen now anyway. They just want blood, any blood, Muslim blood.
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