“Peace-loving Muslims” are “irrelevant?”
March 21st, 2008, 8:37 am · Post a Comment · posted by fsherman
In his column today, Walter Williams announces that despite claims from “experts and talking heads” that Islam is a peaceful religion “In terms of national policy, it’s irrelevant … whether most Muslims are peaceful.”
How so? Because, he says, if a Muslim nation attacks us, the fact it may be only a small percentage of the people who are hostile is irrelevant: We still have to fight back. Besides, “because peace-loving Muslims do not speak out and expose terrorists … they become enemies of the West … Muslims should be prepared to suffer the full might of the West in its efforts to fight terrorism.”
In the first place, this is typical hypocrisy from Williams: He’s been shrieking about Muslim terrorism since 2001, but when Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah Building, Williams’ response was to devote a column to the evil things the US government does that turn people such as McVeigh into terrorists. So much for speaking out.
Second, it is indeed relevant whether Islam, as a religion, is innately hostile to the West. If Islam is some innately evil murderous religion, we have to take different steps than if bin Laden or other Islamic terrorists are simply homicidal sociopaths who happen to be Muslims (which is how I’d classify them).
Third, as a policy guide, Williams’ column is pretty much mush. Williams compares Islam to Nazi Germany — even if a lot of Germans didn’t want to conquer the world, we still had to go in and fight them — but Islam isn’t a nation. Is he suggesting that because bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are both Muslims, attacking Iraq was a logical response to 9/11?
Probably. A running theme in right-wing commentary is that Islam is one vast, monolithic enemy: 9/11, the Muslim conquest of Spain, the siege of Vienna, the Barbary Pirates preying on American shipping and every other clash are somehow all part of the same vast conspiracy against the Western world. Therefore, all Muslims are against us, therefore Iraq, Iran and whatever other country our president points at are legitimate targets (usually, if it’s pointed out this is bigoted and verges on a justification for genocide and ethnic cleansing, the anti-Muslimites will insist that no, no, of course they didn’t mean that … though they’ll be pretty vague about what the alternatives for dealing with such a supposedly evil, bloodthirsty religion are).
I’m sure this plays very well with the hard-right portion of Williams’ audience (white terrorists like McVeigh are justified! Brown-skinned non-Christian terrorists are the enemy of all that is good!), but it’s balderdash.
