The United States definitely sends mixed messages to the Muslim world. Early in his presidency, Barack Obama went to Cairo to “seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world, one based on mutual interest and mutual respect, and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition.” The president proclaimed that America and Islam “share common principles -- principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.”
That all sounds good. Unfortunately, the image has proven stronger than the word. When Muslims around the world turn on the television, open the newspaper, or check out their favorite websites, they are more likely to see injustice, intolerance, and indignity coming from America the (Not Always So) Beautiful. It’s not just the iconic Abu Ghraib pictures from the Bush era. Muslims -- and, of course, everyone else -- can get outraged over the picture of Syed Wali Shah, a seven-year-old victim of a U.S. drone strike in Pakistan. Or the video of laughing Marines urinating on the corpses of Taliban fighters in Afghanistan.
And now with the picture of a partially burned Qur’an -- part of a rescued remnant of copies that troops at the Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan threw into a garbage pit for incineration -- the world’s Muslims can be excused for believing that the Cairo speech was only words. You’d think the U.S. army would be a little more careful. Last April, when members of the Dove World Outreach Center burned a Qur’an after putting it on trial, riots broke out in Afghanistan and left scores of people dead, including seven UN staff.
This time around, the Pentagon insists that the act was inadvertent. That may well be so, but you can’t see “inadvertent” in a picture. In a country where the literacy rate is 28 percent, the third-lowest in the world, a picture can indeed be worth a gazillion words. The United States obviously has a serious image problem.
Here’s the paradox. The U.S. army, which is actively working with Afghans, sponsors what seems like an endless series of cultural awareness workshops to facilitate cooperation. The Marines have mandatory cultural training; you can do pre-deployment training online with the Army; there’s cultural role-playing in a replica of an Afghan village at Fort Polk in Louisiana. Since it works in Muslim-majority countries around the world -- Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait -- the Pentagon takes great pains to avoid charges of Islamophobia.
Yet the Pentagon still manages to fall into the same category as that other famous Qur’an burner, Terry Jones, the Florida preacher who could endure several lifetimes of cultural sensitivity training and remain a knucklehead. Believe it or not, Jones is running for president on a platform of reducing military spending and bringing all U.S. troops home from overseas. No, Jones has not suddenly become a peace activist. He still issues threats to burn more Qur’ans, most recently as a response to the possible execution of an Iranian pastor. But he is the more honest Islamophobe. He genuinely wants to stay away from all Muslims, just as an arachnophobe wants to stay away from all spiders, however irrational the fear might be.
So, how is it that the Pentagon and the Islamophobe, with their opposite views on Islam and intervention, end up generating a similar response in the Muslim world? The answer lies in the image that the Pentagon has of the Muslim world. This is America’s other image problem.
U.S. military operations involve an implicit distinction between “good Muslims” and “bad Muslims.” The “bad Muslims” are, of course, the Taliban, who demonstrated during their brief and bloody reign that they interpret the Qur’an much as Terry Jones interprets the New Testament and Bibi Netanyahu interprets the Old Testament. It’s not a question of fundamentalism. There’s really no such thing as Islamic fundamentalism, for nearly all Muslims take the Qur’an to be the literal word of God (and “fundamentalism” is really a Protestant invention anyway). Rather, it’s a question of interpretation, and the Taliban have ignored all the teachings of the Qur’an that contradict their own medieval beliefs about women, religious tolerance, and warfare.
The “good Muslims,” meanwhile, are Hamid Karzai and all the Afghans who are willing to fight alongside coalition forces. Coalition forces, however, deep down don’t trust their Afghan partners. More than once, Karzai has threatened to quit and join the Taliban himself. And Afghan government soldiers have not just threatened to quit; they’ve done so and brought their sophisticated American-made weapons with them to the Taliban. Last June, Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis visited a coalition base in the Zharay district of Kandahar province and watched as Afghan policemen ignored orders to stop suspected Taliban. “To a man, the U.S. officers in that unit told me they had nothing but contempt for the Afghan troops in their area,” reports Davis in an Armed Forces Journal article, “and that was before the above incident occurred.” It was also before an Afghan intelligence officer, in the wake of the inadvertent Qur’an burning, killed two American servicemen working in the Afghan Interior Ministry, prompting Washington to pull out all its advisors from the Afghan ministries. Since the start of last year, Afghans wearing police or army uniforms have killed at least 36 U.S. and NATO troops.
It’s not that Afghans are inherently untrustworthy. Rather, the United States has put them in an untenable position. They must choose between supporting unpalatable insiders and unpalatable outsiders.
But it’s actually worse than this. “A particularly frustrating feature of the U.S. narrative, for Muslims, is that it divides Muslim society into a progressive liberal and secular sector on one hand and on the other a regressive Islamist sector that seeks to impose backward Islamic traditions. America then seeks to promote the liberal forces and to undermine the Islamist forces,” explains pollster Steven Kull. “It is particularly infuriating to Muslims when America intervenes in a way that is destabilizing, trying to root for one imagined side against another, in what Americans conceive of as an inevitable evolution toward the victory of one side.”
We think we’re helping them. They think we’re out to destroy their way of life.
Even with all the sensitivity trainings in the world, which amount to little more than lipsticking the pig, the U.S. army remains an occupation force in Afghanistan. This occupation force has stirred the nationalist impulses of Afghans, prompted the use of desperate measures such as suicide bombings, and created the semblance of a crusade by the West against Islam. The wars conducted in Afghanistan and Iraq have had little to do with Islam per se. They have been about geopolitics, natural resources, and the reassertion of U.S. military power. But many in the Islamic world view these conflicts as an assault on their religion. The Qur’an burning is not the only indignity. Afghans, points out FPIF contributor Julia Heath, “don’t approve of how U.S. troops bring dogs into their homes or touch their women because these are culturally offensive actions. Shopkeeper Wali Aziz says, ‘They [U.S. troops] are careless with our holy things, and they are careless with our country.’” Whenever such desecrations take place, they reinforce the notion that religion is at the heart of the conflict rather than at the periphery.
It doesn’t help that so many U.S. politicians talk about Islam as though it were the greatest enemy of humanity. President Obama was quick to apologize for the latest Qur’an burning outrage. But Republicans were equally quick to seize on the apology as proof of Obama’s “weakness,” as Rick Santorum put it. Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich piled on with their own criticisms of the president’s diplomatic gesture. Indeed, rarely does a day go by in the Republican primaries that one of the candidates doesn’t defame Islam. Santorum and Gingrich have both laid it on thick with their wild accusations about the threat of sharia law and their misrepresentations of the Park51 Islamic cultural center.
“So far, Mitt Romney has largely remained above the fray,” I write in an Other Words op-ed Running Against Islam. “He often resorts to carefully couched phrases like ‘Islam is not an inherently violent faith.’ But the man who has changed his position on so many issues may well be laying the groundwork for another flip-flop. Walid Phares, a right-wing pundit and prominent Islamophobe, is one of Romney’s advisors. And the pro-Romney Super PAC Restore Our Future is masterminded by Larry McCarthy, the attack ad specialist. McCarthy not only designed the Willie Horton spot that swung the 1988 presidential race in George H.W. Bush's favor; he also put together an error-laced ad about Park51 that nearly deep-sixed Iowa Democrat Rep. Bruce Baley in his 2010 reelection bid.”
Sure, we could try to send all the Republican candidates and some Democrats as well down to Fort Polk to train alongside U.S. soldiers and learn how to behave respectfully toward Muslims. But even if they become as diplomatic as Mr. Sensitivity himself, Barack Obama, the United States continues to wage war in predominantly Muslim countries, and fire-starters like Pamela Geller or Robert Spencer continue to badmouth not Islam or “bad Muslims” or “Islamic radicalism,” but mainstream Islam itself. Park51, which expanded the Geller-Spencer soapbox to monstrous proportions, was hardly the threat they made it out to be. If they’d only bothered to read the writings of the cultural center’s founder, they might have discovered a philosophical co-religionist.
As I write in my new book Crusade 2.0: The West’s Resurgent War on Islam, “Ironically, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf was just the kind of ‘good Muslim’ that conservatives loved to cozy up to in order to prove that they were not Islamophobic. In his writings, the imam quotes approvingly from Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and conservative literary critic Allan Bloom, lauds corporate power unfettered by state control, believes that ‘anti-religionism crept in as a new state religion’ in the twentieth century, and condemns Hamas as a terrorist organization.” But for all his conservative tendencies, the imam remains an imam. In the eyes of Geller and Spencer, the only good Muslim is a secular Muslim.
Somehow we must combine a principled engagement with the Muslim world with a principled withdrawal from areas of combat. If the troops don’t come home and the drones don’t stop killing civilians, fine speeches and sensitivity trainings will just seem like hypocrisy, our words and our images will remain far apart, and the chasm between the West and Islam will endure, nowhere more so than in the imaginations of those twin extremists, the Taliban and the Islamophobes.
Subscribe to FPIF's World Beat here. Sign up with FPIF on Facebook. Follow FPIF on Twitter
Crusade 2.0 available here.
Follow John Feffer on Twitter: www.twitter.com/johnfeffer
=========
The Taliban and all orthodox, traditional Muslims follow the interpretation of the Koran arrived at by consensus between Islam's greatest scholars and published by the major schools of jurisprudence.
It's called Sharia law and it has not changed in any significant way since the Middle Ages.
===============
Yes, if you systematically ignore the ways in which all societies change and evolve in history.
and yet there was still a Golden Age for Jews in Islamic Spain and more recently, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia, Senegal, Turkey, Kyrgyzstan and Kosovo have had female presidents/prime ministers. The US still hasn't had a female president yet.
The Islamic world has an image problem. And it keeps getting worse by the day. When is someone going to demand apolgies for the military folks THEY killed in response to a book burning? What about the supposed "Shared common principles" The president talked about that they had with the US?
When we turn on the TV, internet or radio, we see far worse then the injustice, intolerance, and indignity they see from the US. We see riots, death and destruction- from Iraq, to afganastan, to the destroyed graves of British WWII veterans in Lybia.....Whos going to stand up and demand they, in teh islamic world, be more sensative, careful and tolerant?
You mention errors in ads about Parks51, but why not mention the errors and lies the Folks at Parks51 told? Or how about that sensativity you talked about the US needs, when they didnt even talk to the folks whose folsk died in 9/11.....talk about lack of sensativity.
Are you Mr Feffer? Are you going to make the same demands of the Islamic world, for first ammendment freedoms? Justice? Sensativity?
This statement says un-Islamic all over it.
In the Muslim world there is a 2 tiered citizenship. The non-Muslim can only hold, what is called a dhimmi status. For example, in Pakistan and Egypt a non-Muslim is barred from holding the position of president and Pakistan as judges and other key positions - in their Constitutions!
Built in discrimination, that most Muslims feel comfortable with as a part of God's unchanging law.
What the President is saying - is 'I am negotiating on America's behalf' with this.
If Muslim nations see their non-Muslim citizens in this way and the US is the strongest predominately non-Muslim nation on earth - it might not matter what they do.
In Pakistan anti-Hindu sentiment is taught in school curriculum, likewise in the Muslim world the anti-US sentiment - started long before Bush.
::
It might be better if we had leaders who could say to the Muslim world - that although we do respect you - we don't think you have the right to kill or use coercion in the name of your religion.
And as in the case of the Koran burning [send new copies straight of the press] - we don't think you have the right to sentence anyone to death for breaking with your religious laws - see Muhammad Twitterer in Saudi and Christian pastor in Iran.
The purpose of a military is to break things and kill people, NOT to do civic action projects. Breaking things and killing people is something they can do quite effectively and, if people threaten us, that is exactly what they SHOULD do. But you don't need to rehabilitate people. It's sort of like a compuer program:
00 THEY DO SOMETHING THAT WARRANTS IT
10 WE BREAK THINGS AND KILL PEOPLE
20 WE LEAVE
30 IF: THEY DO SOMETHING THAT WARRANTS IT THEN; GOTO 10
REPEAT AS NEEDED
Yes, let's pull out. But I guarantee you the Muslim world will fall when the "big bad bully" pulls out. Left to fend for themselves, the far right in the Muslim world carry a significant amount of power. Left to their own devices, I fear most of the Muslim world will end up deprived of civil rights and economic growth, leading to more conflict. But this is not a Western issue and I did not agree to us going in the first place. And negotiate with the Muslim world? The West has been trying that for decades and things only seem to be getting worse as our soldiers die for those scream for their blood but beg for Western money. Well I beg and scream to differ, I think it's time we left. We have caused plently of damage to the Muslim world and ourselves because of all this fighting. But I fear we've thrown our hands into the fire and now we might not be able to get out.
And, let us not forget those beautiful pictures from northern Afghanistan, under Taliban control, of a couple stoned to dea.th because the woman would not marry the man her family sold her to and ran away with a man she loved to become his second wife.
Sorry, but these countries had the opportunities to create a new society, one without Saddam the mur.derer, and the other without the mur.dering control freaks of the Taliban.
So take it easy with the US is to blame for all their troubles bs. These countries were both given an opportunity to have better lives.
Remember how the US was cheered in both countries when they arrived? Then the ter.rorists came in with their violence which is why those countries are in the predicament they find themselves in. Place the blame where it belongs, on the ter.rorists.
Saddam was worse, as was the Taliban.
Did you miss the mass graves in the desert filled with Iraqis, courtesy of Saddam? How about the tor.ture chambers of many prisons throughout Iraq where people simply disappeared?
How many people were hung, be.headed, tor.tured, mutil.ated by the Taliban? How many school girls had acid thrown on them because they had the audacity to want to attend school?
The US stopped all of that, and all the violence that came after is due to the ter.rorists, not the US. The US is forced to do what it needs to to get at the ter.rorists who use the civilian population as a place to hide. There are foreign ter.rorist all over Afghanistan and Iraq, but the US is blamed for the violence there.
Thank you for your great article, Mr. Feffer.
These extremists who react in such ways aren't acting or thinking about the true religion, they're just seeking revenge for a political/social/etc. issue, and try to ease their conscience by finding a thinly-supported verse to justify their actions.
We can all see through the hypocrisy with a little research, however many (such as Islamophobes) just prefer to claim that such hypocrites are the real Muslims.