Exploit the Terrorists’ Weakest Link: Islam

opinion by Kent Chadwick, the free press

Allah akbar. Allah is great. Allah’s heart has been broken by theterrorist murders of innocent children, women, and men. As manycommentators have noted, the terrorists used tactical jujitsu againstthe US on September 11th. They turned to evil advantage our patternedresponses to hijackings. Law enforcement, pilots, and crew had beentrained to buy time in the event of a hijacking, go along withdemands, not play the hero, negotiate, get the plane on the ground andimmobilize it, then overcome the hijackers. But these recentterrorists exploited those responses, hit us in our blind spot, andturned hijacked planes into suicide bombs, and airborne hostages intoshields covering attacks on unexpectedly vulnerable groundtargets.

The masterminds behind the September 11th attacks must haveanticipated a strong military response from the US. They may haveunderestimated the ferocity of the actions we are now taking, but theyprobably expect that even their destruction will lead to greatersupport for their cause. Kill the dragon, they might be tellingthemselves, and from its teeth will spring up hundreds of new warriorsto carry on the cause.

However, we can use tactical jujitsu as well. We can hit them in theirblind spot—their blind faith that the worldwide Islamic community willjustify and even celebrate their crimes. We can turn their horriblesuccess against them by assiduously undermining religiousjustification for their crimes. As President Bush pointed out in hisaddress to the Joint Session of Congress, Islam is not America’senemy. In fact, Islam is the terrorists’ weakest link: they haveshamelessly taken Islamic support for granted, never imagining that itcould be taken away from them.

But their attacks have created American Muslim martyrs. Among the deadand mourned at the World Trade Center are hundreds of Muslims, bothAmericans and citizens of nations around the world. This is thecontradiction within Osama bin Laden’s edict calling for theindiscriminate killing of Americans. Americans are Muslims. Just as weare Christians and Jews and Buddhists and Native American animists andHindus and Sikhs and Rastafarians and agnostics and atheists, we arealso Muslims. Islam is one of America’s growing religions. Estimatesof the number of American Muslims range as high as 5,500,000 accordingto the 1996 World Almanac. America’s pluralistic society and religiousfreedoms have allowed many different sects and traditions of Islam toflourish, from the Black Muslims to orthodox Sunni and ShiiteMuslims.

The names and life stories of the Muslims killed in the terroristattacks on September 11th should be spread all over the Islamic world.The US State Department should make those victims’ faces as well-knownworld-wide as bin Laden’s. Their deaths should underscore for theIslamic world the injustice and unrighteousness of mass terror,murders that Allah cannot accept. The US government, Americaninstitutions, and individual Americans can appeal to and work withIslamic mosques, clergy, and organizations against mass terror.President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Secretaries Powell andRumsfeld should be seen visiting mosques as often as they are seenvisiting churches. They should cultivate friendships and policyguidance from leading Islamic clerics and scholars who reject terroras inconsistent with the teachings of Muhammad.

With its Muslim allies, the US should sponsor an international Islamicconference to discuss terrorism and force extremist elements to haveto defend and rationalize the murders of American Muslims. Suicidebombing is already extremely controversial among Muslim theologians,with most rejecting the practice as violating the strong prohibitionagainst suicide in the Quran. International Islamic condemnation ofsuicidal terrorists as murderers, not holy martyrs, would do more toend this practice than any other action the US could take.

We can help give an international forum and worldwide attention toimportant Islamic leaders like Egypt’s Imam Sheikh Mohammed SayedTantawi of Cairo’s Al-Azhar mosque who denounced the terroristsattacks on the United States and told worshippers that, “He who killsa person without necessity... will never go to heaven.”

There is a great tradition within Islam that American political andreligious leaders can call on: an ancient respect for people of thebook, Jews and Christians, whose scriptures Muhammad accepted asdivinely inspired. We can make clear to the Muslim world that thesemass murders were crimes against humanity, murders of innocentchildren, women, and men, killings of Muslims and people of the book,done by criminals who take sadistic pleasure in the violentdismemberment of human beings. Osama bin Laden’s self-proclaimed edictof death against all Americans is a call to genocide. Its issuance isa crime against humanity that has no orthodox Islamic justification.The seduction and manipulation of angry and lonely young men intocommitting suicide and murder is against the direct teachings of theQuran.

As President Bush put it, the terrorists are attempting to hijackIslam as well. We can turn the tables on them by working religiously,taking Islam and its true leaders seriously, and separating theterrorists from their religious self-justification. Effectivelystripping suicidal terrorists of any claims to martyrdom would be asurprise defeat that they could hardly recover from.