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 the terrorist murders of innocent children, women, and men. As many commentators have noted, the terrorists used tactical jujitsu against the US on September 11th. They turned to evil advantage our patterned responses to hijackings. Law enforcement, pilots, and crew had been trained to buy time in the event of a hijacking, go along with demands, not play the hero, negotiate, get the plane on the ground and immobilize it, then overcome the hijackers. But these recent terrorists exploited those responses, hit us in our blind spot, and turned hijacked planes into suicide bombs, and airborne hostages into shields covering attacks on unexpectedly vulnerable ground targets.

The masterminds behind the September 11th attacks must have anticipated a strong military response from the US. They may have underestimated the ferocity of the actions we are now taking, but they probably expect that even their destruction will lead to greater support for their cause. Kill the dragon, they might be telling themselves, and from its teeth will spring up hundreds of new warriors to carry on the cause.

However, we can use tactical jujitsu as well. We can hit them in their blind spot—their blind faith that the worldwide Islamic community will justify and even celebrate their crimes. We can turn their horrible success against them by assiduously undermining religious justification for their crimes. As President Bush pointed out in his address to the Joint Session of Congress, Islam is not America’s enemy. In fact, Islam is the terrorists’ weakest link: they have shamelessly taken Islamic support for granted, never imagining that it could be taken away from them.

But their attacks have created American Muslim martyrs. Among the dead and mourned at the World Trade Center are hundreds of Muslims, both Americans and citizens of nations around the world. This is the contradiction within Osama bin Laden’s edict calling for the indiscriminate killing of Americans. Americans are Muslims. Just as we are Christians and Jews and Buddhists and Native American animists and Hindus and Sikhs and Rastafarians and agnostics and atheists, we are also Muslims. Islam is one of America’s growing religions. Estimates of the number of American Muslims range as high as 5,500,000 according to the 1996 World Almanac. America’s pluralistic society and religious freedoms have allowed many different sects and traditions of Islam to flourish, from the Black Muslims to orthodox Sunni and Shiite Muslims.

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

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

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

There is a great tradition within Islam that American political and religious leaders can call on: an ancient respect for people of the book, Jews and Christians, whose scriptures Muhammad accepted as divinely inspired. We can make clear to the Muslim world that these mass murders were crimes against humanity, murders of innocent children, women, and men, killings of Muslims and people of the book, done by criminals who take sadistic pleasure in the violent dismemberment of human beings. Osama bin Laden’s self-proclaimed edict of death against all Americans is a call to genocide. Its issuance is a crime against humanity that has no orthodox Islamic justification. The seduction and manipulation of angry and lonely young men into committing suicide and murder is against the direct teachings of the Quran.

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