As usual I'm probably about 10 steps behind other blogs, but here it goes.
On Friday, during a protest of the Islamictoons in Pakistan, a muslim Cleric offered a bounty on the heads of the men who drew the cartoons that parodied the prophet Muhammad. His bounty, when added to the bounty of several other Muslims now come to over one million dollars. And a car.
"If the West can place a bounty on Osama bin Laden ... we can also announce reward for killing the man who has caused this sacrilege of the holy prophet," Qureshi told Reuters, referring to the $25 million U.S. bounty on the al-Qaida leader's head."
This is whoh to say the least, and I can't recall anything like this since Iran placed the bounty on the head of Salman Rushdie when he wrote
Satanic Verses. At that time Rushdie had been forced underground for years, only resurfacing sporadically.
The solution? Well if you had asked me that question a month ago I would have said a united front behind free speech might have worked, but the Muslim world is so agitated, and Western culture so divided that a united front has no possibility of working. At the same time ducking for cover isn't going to work either. This war...no war isn't the right word. In a war you have targets, and you have an enemy, and you have goals. This conflict has none of those things. Instead this is a war of ideals as much as policy, and with their backs against the wall (and yes, it is the Islamic world on the defensive by the way--you don't see Iraqi troops patrolling down 5th Avenue do you?) they truly have nothing to lose. I still support freedom of speech. I have to. And yet this freedom is a great power, and if reading Spider-Man should have told us anything, it is that with great power comes great responsibility.
I'm going to take a brief sideline here, and then talk about some recent developments in the Israel/ Palestine conflict, so bear with me here. My rant has some purpose.
When I was an undergrad in college I was a member of a fraternity, Tau Epsilon Phi. At the time we paid roughly $180 a semester for dues. Yet for the most part, much like US taxes, that money went to our national organization and we never saw a cent of it. (Turns out later that we had our own Bush in charge of National, and he was robbing us blind, but that's another story). Anyway there was a huge debate within our chapter about whether we should pay dues or not. We all loved being in our frat. We loved the brotherhood and the camaraderie among us, but we were pretty broke and that $180, that we perceived as going up in smoke, sometimes meant the difference between eating or starving, buying school books or paying rent. Furthermore, when we asked to know where the money was going--when we asked for national to have itself audited--we were placated, and patronized. We were told that the dealings of National were complex and intricate and an audit would cost us even more money than we had.
(Did I mention to you that we were getting robbed blind at this point? I did? Ok...)
When I think about this time in my life, I think about this Islamictoon problem, and our general issues with the Middle East. We're told by our great and terrible leader Bush that they "hate us because of our freedoms." Bullshit. You'd have to be seven years old and a moron to believe that. They hate us, not for our freedoms, but because we use these freedoms wantonly, and in ways that punish them, and only punish them.
Do you think that they are hearing the voices of moderation over there? Are we hearing the voices of moderation here? All we see on the news, in our blogs, are the attacks on Westerners, and the extremists Clerics calling for blood and death. Yet, what do they see over there? They see those new Abu Graib photos that Australia released. They see American soldiers dragging Iraqis from their homes with complete disrespect, and British troops beating Iraqi teenagers in the streets. They see Israel drawing up measures against Hamas yesterday, barring Palestinian workers and goods from entering Israel from the Gaza Strip and banning travel between Gaza and the West Bank. You might think, "Ok that's fine, what's so wrong about that?" What's wrong with it, is the economic damage that will be inflicted on the Palestinians. Much like our legal and illegal Mexican immigrants, they depend on work and trade with Israel. Cutting them off from that will cause a massive loss of income. You say "Well they're blowing up Israelis! Why shouldn't they cut them off to save their selves?" I could talk about the historical damage Israel's done to Palestine. But you know, I'm tired of belaboring that point. The fact is that you can either keep spinning the wheels of the past or you can try something new, and we all know that the former is the definition of insanity.
It's a long hard road. No one is going to deny it. But the goal at the end of it is more than worth some struggle. We cannot fight their fire with fire. We must fight their fire with water, and like Pat Buchanan has suggested that water comes in the form of various foreign aid and incentives to countries in the Middle East, especially Hamas and Palestine. Which would you rather spend? Money from our country, one of the wealthiest in the world? Or the blood of American troops? It is hard to hate the hand that feeds, especially when the hand comes with the opportunity of freedom. And for God's sake, could we please, please! Stop making every dammed TV show and movie feature Muslims only as terrorists and taxi drivers? Maybe if we had a friggin sitcom or something showing Islamic people as normal rather than insane it would help perceptions on both sides of the Atlantic. By the way, that just happens to be free speech as well. It's called realism.
Look, all I'm saying here is that we're losing this battle, and doing the same thing, or as Bush likes to say, "staying the course," is suicidal. We need to change our strategy and change it now, before it is too late. When I was an undergrad I joined with the voices of moderation and tried to argue that maybe National was misunderstood. I gave them the benefit of the doubt and it turns out that I was wrong.
Years down the road, when the Middle East is a sheet of glass and our friends in Israel are charred pieces of flesh, will it turn out that we were wrong? One can only pray.
