The Tampa-area marine reservist thought he had saved his town. After being approached by a man he believed to be an Arab terrorist at the local Seaport Channelside apartment complex, Bruce did what any alert, terror alert-conscious citizen would do — he beat him with a tire iron, chased him down three city blocks and then alerted the police to let them know he was detaining the man.
The police, however, didn’t see the situation the same way Bruce did. For starters, they determined that, instead of being engaged in anything nefarious, the man was merely a lost motorist asking for directions. And then there was the tricky matter of the individual’s identity. As it turned out that the “Arab terrorist” Bruce attempted to take into custody was one Alexios Marakis — a Greek Orthodox priest from Crete, visiting the local St. Nicholas Cathedral.
Unfortunately, Bruce’s actions were far from surprising. Stories like the one above have been making the rounds for years, especially since Sept. 11, 2001. And it’s especially not surprising considering its particular context — coming days after last week’s tragedy at the Fort Hood military base in Killeen, Texas, in which deranged U.S. Army physician Nidal Malik Hasan — who happened to be Islamic — opened fire on and murdered 13 fellow soldiers. Another 30 were wounded by the attacks.
Within days, Pat Robertson was out repeating his familiar anti-Islamic trope. He told the viewers of his 700 Club broadcast that: “Islam is ... a violent political system bent on the overthrow of the governments of the world and world domination. ... And I think we should treat it as such, and treat its adherents as such, as we would members of the Communist Party, or members of some fascist group.”
Out in the real world, removed from Robertson’s tired phantasms, reactions were hardly more encouraging. Brian Kilmeade, a host for FOX News — which, regardless of its reliability, is a fair weather-vane of mainstream right-of-center thought — asked on-air if he thinks “it’s time for the military to have special debriefings of Muslim army officers — anybody enlisted?” Sen. Joe Lieberman, chair of the Senate’s Homeland Security committee, allowed his mouth to outrace the facts of the tragedy and outright called the murders a “terrorist act” — and in doing so, implied that terrorism is the exclusive domain of Islam, elaborating: “There are very, very strong warning signs here that Dr. Hasan had become an Islamist extremist and, therefore, that this was a terrorist act.”
For some reason, though, no one saw fit to bring up the question of terrorism last summer, when anti-abortion activist Scott Roeder assassinated Kansas physician George Tiller. This despite the fact that Roeder’s aims, and those of other similarly-minded militant anti-abortion activists — to have Tiller’s murder function as a deterrent to dissuade other physicians from performing abortions, both first-and-second trimester and late-term — fit the dictionary definition of terrorism to a tee. And one would have been hard pressed to see anyone question, after the murder, if all Christians were risks to perform similar acts of savagery — despite the fact that Christianity, as interpreted by Roeder, provided a much more explicit motivation for Roeder’s actions than Islam did in the case of Hasan.
Religion, however, hardly accounts as a sufficient explanation for either man’s deed. For men with the capacity to commit such barbarities, religion serves only as a rationale, not an impetus. Thankfully, our civilian and military hierarchy recognizes this truth; Gen. George Casey, the army’s highest-ranking general, publicly praised the contribution of Islamic soldiers and spoke out against any potential backlash in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. And President Obama, in the greatest speech of his presidency thus far — in perhaps the greatest speech given by any president since Lyndon Johnson embraced the civil rights movement’s message of “We shall overcome” — told the survivors of Fort Hood on Tuesday: “This much we do know — no faith justifies these murderous and craven acts; no just and loving God looks upon them with favor. For what he has done, we know that the killer will be met with justice — in this world, and the next.”
However, a shadow of doubt still hangs over Islam that does not so hang over any other religious group. It’s this shadow that allows congressmen to feel justified in calling for an investigation of Muslim congressional interns, as Republican Congressmen Paul Broun, Trent Franks, Sue Myrick and John Shadegg did in mid-October. And it’s this shadow that allows some to talk as if Hasan’s religion is the only relevant aspect of his biography.
Such a stance is wholly illegitimate. It cannot be tolerated in the public square of any well-meaning society; though it is not possible to prevent such thoughts from seeping through, they must be countered vigorously at every turn.
For such talk has far more sinister consequences than merely diminishing and calling into question the deeds of the thousands of Islamic soldiers who have fought and died for the United States of America. Beyond dancing past the graves of some of our greatest heroes, such talk also trivializes and perverts the deaths of the 13 soldiers who were gunned down at Fort Hood — and uses the fact of their existence to achieve ends that are the very antithesis of the ideals those 13 men and women were prepared to lay down their lives for.
Editorials Editor Asher Smith is a College junior from Great Neck, N.Y.
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