Myths About Islam and the War

There seems to be nothing about ignorance about Islam and the War on Terror - part of which is being fought in Iraq, on the part of Americans.
We don’t even have a good word to describe the enemy we face in this war, President Bush calls it a war on Terror or Terrorism. Terrorism is a tactic or a strategy, calling this war a War on Terror is like calling World War II a war on Blitzkrieg or Kamikazes. War against radical or militant Islam would be a better term but that is politically incorrect largely because it is perceived as being racist. Yet this too is an example of ignorance, Islam is not a race it is a religious faith and our enemies come from all different races.
Unfortunately these myths are only the tip of the iceberg and it looks increasingly like America is operating in complete ignorance in this war. So I’m going to try to identify a few of these myths and debunk them.
Myth 1) Islam is a religion of peace, partially true Islam does want peace but that peace is the traditional Islamic concept of peace which is not the modern Western idea of peace. The modern Western notion of peace is a wide variety of peoples and nations living together without conflict or war. The traditional Islamic concept of peace is all nations living under an Islamic government based on traditional Islamic law and all non Muslims subjugated by Islamic rulers. Furthermore Jihad or Holy War for conquest of non-Muslims is a traditional of tenet of Islam that goes back to the Prophet Mohammad who waged wars of conquest against non-Muslims. It is the duty of Islamic men to wage war on non-Muslims unless they convert to Islam, submit to Islamic rule or make a treaty with Muslim rulers. The vast majority of Islamic men don’t practice this, but it is a key doctrine of their traditional faith.
Myth 2) Islam is a tolerant faith, not true Islam is a very intolerant faith. The Koran and traditional Islamic law and theology ban all sorts of things, homosexuality, eating pork, adultery and equality for women. Traditional Islam proscribes the death penalty for Moslems to convert to other faiths. Criticism of the Prophet and the faith was a crime punishable by the death penalty. Yes, non Muslims can live in traditional Islamic societies but they are hardly equals. Historically in Islamic ruled lands Jews, Christians, Pagans and others had to pay a high tax, had to wear distinctive clothing, couldn’t build new churches, had to keep quiet, couldn’t build houses higher than Muslims. In most Islamic lands these days these rules are still enforced, people are killed for converting to Christianity, women are killed for not covering their bodies, and writers and intellectuals are killed or imprisoned for exercising freedom of speech.
Myth 3) In the past such as Medieval times, Moslems were advanced, civilized, tolerant and peaceful while Christians were violent, ignorant, greedy, intolerant and imperialistic. The truth is that historically Moslems were just as violent, ignorant, greedy, intolerant and imperialistic as Christians were. For over a thousand years from the time of the Prophet Mohammed to the wars of the Ottoman Empire various Muslim peoples, Arabs, Seljuk Turks, Ottoman Turks, Moguls, Mongols, waged brutal and bloody wars of conquest against the rest of the world. Moslem armies burned cities, massacred civilians, took thousands of people as slaves and looted large areas of the Earth. Yes Europeans were imperialists but Muslims were practicing imperialism centuries before Europeans got into the business.
4) In medieval times various Muslim societies were highly civilized, tolerant and scientifically and technologically advanced while Europeans were barbarians wallowing in the ignorance of the dark ages. Partially true, yes some Islamic societies such as the Arab and Spanish caliphates were advanced for their time. People bathed once a week or once a month instead of not at all, a few people in town knew how to read and write and some scientific research was conducted by a few intrepid men. Yet this was nothing like a modern society there was no science or technology. Nor was there real tolerance, Jews and Christians were tolerated because they had skills or money valuable to the state. Massacres of Jews were just as common in Medieval Muslim communities as Christian ones and Medieval Christian codes that restricted Jews to living in ghettos and wearing special clothes were simply copies of Moslem ones. It must also be noted here that in Medieval times the Greek Christian Byzantine Empire was just as advanced and as civilized as any Muslim society and had access to scientific and technological secrets the Muslims lacked such as Greek fire a kind of Medieval napalm that was the Byzantine secret weapon.
5) Islamic terrorists are fighting us because they see us as a threat to their faith and civilization and if we just left them alone they’d leave us alone. Not true, these people feel they have a Holy Duty ordained by God to fight and conquer us. They will fight us if see they us as attacking or invading Islamic lands and if we withdraw they’ll keep fighting us. American troops weren’t fighting in the Middle East on Sept. 11, 2001, yet we were still savagely attacked by militant Moslems on that date.
6) The people fighting us in Iraq are Iraqi patriots outraged by the American invasion of their country. Not true, most Iraqis don’t buy into the Western or American concept of patriotism and do not see Iraq as a nation. Many of those fighting us are devout Muslims who recognize only one nation - the nation of Islam. Others are simply fighting for the interests of their particular religious or ethnic group i.e. Shiites or Kurds. A great deal of those fighting us are fanatical Sunni Muslims from all over the world who simply want a chance to fight Americans on the battlefield. If they weren’t attacking us in Iraq they’d be attacking us elsewhere say here in the US. At least in Iraq they fighting US troops who can fight back rather than unarmed American civilians.
7) Iraq is a real legitimate, historic nation like the United States not true. Yes people have lived in the region now called Iraq for thousands of years and it boasts the world’s oldest civilization but historically it was not a nation. It was a province or group of province of various empires in which a number of different ethnic and religious groups lived. Iraq is a modern fiction invented by the British, Winston Churchill in particular, to enable His Majesty’s Army to control the oil fields and the region. Churchill grouped a number of people into a country and appointed a king to rule them. Iraq is nothing but an illusion, if our troops fight for it they will die for nothing. The Iraqi people don’t give a damn about Iraq and neither should we.
8) The Islamic and Arab peoples want democracy, not true, the people who run the Arab nations the Islamic scholars and clerics, the Westernized intellectuals, the military men, the nobles and royalty in the Gulf states have seen democracy and want no part of it. They see Western democracy as being incompatible with their faith and culture and attempts to spread democracy to them as a threat to their faith and culture and their positions of power and influence within it. Simply planting a democracy in the Middle East to expose the people there to it won’t work. Turkey has been a democracy for seventy years and Israel has been a democracy for sixty years the example of these successful states didn’t sway Arab thinkers why should Iraq. A serious attempt was made to create an Arab Democracy in Lebanon and Islamic extremists destroyed it. So any attempt to create Arab Democracy will fail and fail miserably. American efforts to build democracy in Iraq are doomed no matter how many elections we hold there and how many constitutions we write.
These are just a few of the myths that distort our view of reality and hinder our war effort. Unfortunately they are only the tip of the massive iceberg that is our ignorance of Islam and our world. Hopefully, we’ll overcome that iceberg before it dooms our nation’s future.