Seize the Moment:  Interfaith Cooperation Against Terrorism
by Dr. Robert D. Crane

Seize the Moment:  Interfaith Cooperation Against Terrorism

by Dr. Robert D. Crane

I.  Introduction

Ever since 9/11, national security has dominated American foreign policy, both foreign and domestic.  The challenge has been how to combat terrorism as a phenomenon in the modern era of institutionalized globalization.  An increasingly important task within this challenge is how to promote cooperation among religions in countering the religious extremism that can lead to the vicious cycle of terrorism and terrorist counter-terrorism.

The simplistic answer is to mobilize all societal forces, especially military force, to destroy “radical Islam,” which many are convinced will be the central challenge to America perhaps for the remainder of this century. 

If we are engaged in a Fourth World War against terrorism, we need every ally we can find.  The most logical response would be to support non-radical Muslims in their effort to marginalize the radicals who have attempted to hi-jack the religion of Islam, because no-one else can effectively fight the terrorists “on their own turf.”

The very phrase “radical Islam” is an oxymoron, because, no matter how many Muslims are radicals and even terrorists, this has nothing to do with the religion Islam, which the radicals attempt to jijack for their ideologies of hatred and destruction.  Those who refuse to separate the two terms “radical” and “Islam” are suicidal, because Osama bin Laden agrees with their ignorant understanding of Islam and welcomes their support. 

This demonizing of Islam as a strategy to counter terrorism has surfaced from time to time over the past couple of decades with greater or lesser virulence.  Right now during the Election Year 2008 it has gained high visibility again because both of the major parties are exploiting it to get votes.  Since 9/11, the Republican Party has been the most egregious offender.  This is why the overwhelming majority of Muslims in America have come to conclude that the best way to defend Islam is to support the Democratic Party. 

Maha Elegenaidi asks, “Why would Muslims be supporting McCain or the Republican Party at this time?  That’s a great question.” Irfan Rydhan adds, “I don’t know why any Muslim would support the Republicans at this point in time.  Maybe 20-30 years ago it was okay, but today its a different world.”

The answer to these concerns is precisely that it is a different world, a world of unprecedented challenges and opportunities.  We must dare to recognize them and work within all of America’s political parties to seize the moment. 

What are the signs of a moment ready to be seized.  Michael Gerson was perhaps the first to see the handwriting on the wall.  Writing between the two party conventions at the beginning of September, 2008, but after McCain announced Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential pick, he suggests that Barack Obama no longer is a breathe of fresh air in the Democratic Party, and that Sarah Palin opens up a new possibility of bringing truly fresh air into American policy-making through the Republican Party. 

Until this year, Michael Gerson was an insider inside the insiders at the White House.  Earlier this year he left in disgust to become an op-ed writer for the liberal Washington Post and to join the Council on Foreign Relations as a senior fellow to finance his crusade against the NeoCon cabal, which had captured the White House, hi-jacked the Republican Party, and now seeks to do the same to the Democrats.  Gerson’s coming-out party was his article in the January 28th, 2008, issue of Newsweek, “How My Party Lost Its Way.”

His second most memorable article, entitled “The Right Address for a Rebel,” was published in the Washington Post of September 4th, 2008 comparing Obama with Palin and contending that the title as rebel in chief had passed in only one week’s time, at least potentially, from the Democrats to the Republicans. 

Gerson seems to have been bitterly disappointed with Obama at the Democratic Convention.  He writes, “With his fiery but forgettable speech last week, Obama was consumed by the establishment he had conquered.  He chose to lead his party into battle under the white flag of his total surrender.” He asks whether in a supposedly Democratic Year Obama simply thinks he has “votes to squander in the pursuit of a narrow, polarized victory.”

His new hope in the Republican Party comes from his advice that, “McCain has only two options: be a reformer or be a victim.  The main benefit of Sarah Palin on the ticket is not her gender or her conservatism but her deserved reputation as a foe of Republican corruption in Alaska.  McCain has the background to deliver a message of reform with credibility.  His own reputation for Republican china shop rampages is also deserved, on issues of campaign finance reform to immigration to torture to climate change.  But the policy pronouncements of his campaign have, so far been fairly conventional - more tax cuts, more drilling, modest health reforms.  And Americans will not give credit to the past maverick without the promise of a future one.”

The clincher, which may be whistling Dixie in challenging what has now become the Republican Old Guard (in memory of southerners singing their “national anthem” during Sherman’s march of total destruction through Georgia toward the end of the Civil war), is Gerson’s final advice: “McCain needs to announce new and unexpected reform proposals.” He mentions “new ideas for winning hearts and minds in the developing world,” which at the outer limits of credibility might even mean a paradigmatic shift in both foreign and domestic policy from peace through power to peace, prosperity, and freedom through compassionate justice.  Gerson declares that there is only one way the intellectually challenged and morally bankrupt Republican Party can or should win the White House in November:  “Voters must be able to say.  I have never heard that from a Republican before.”

The single issue that most concerns Muslims during the 2008 election is the demonizing of Islam as a religion.  A logical corollary issue, but secondary in importance, is the generic demonization of Muslims.  The Muslim vote will depend in part on which of the two major parties can most credibly disassociate itself from such demonization.  This, in turn, will depend on which party can most credibly renounce its ties to the NeoConservative movement.

The Democrats send a mixed message.  Barack Obama repudiates any link between Islam as a religion and those Muslim terrorists who have tried to hijack it.  Furthermore, he has nuanced positions that leave open the extent to which he shares the NeoCon perspective on foreign policy.  All of the candidates have competed in pursuing peace through power, which may be why none of the major candidates in the election of 2008 has mentioned peace through justice.  Obama’s track record, however, shows that he might at least comprehend justice as a new paradigm of both domestic and foreign policy. 

The mixed message results from his vice-presidential choice, Senator Biden, who has shown independence from the NeoCon leaders but went out of his way to support Israel, right or wrong, by announcing, “I am a Zionist.”  Zionism in the Likudnik sense of return to a physical land rather than to God, has never been part of the NeoCon message.  Nevertheless, historically such Zionists have exploited the NeoConservative movement for their own agenda, just as the NeoConservative leaders have exploited the Zionists as useful allies.

The Republican Party, and especially the Republican standard bearer, Senator McCain, is inextricably linked to the NeoConservative movement.  He would have to unequivocally renounce his ties to it in order to have any credibility as an independent candidate for change.  He would have to prove such independence by demonstrating the courage to pursue compassionate justice as the most powerful counter to terrorism. 

He could win the election by calling for a Second American Revolution, which 99% of the American Electorate might welcome by saying “I have never heard that from a Republican before.”  Actually the Second American Revolution was President Ronald Reagan’s term for his proposals to make everyone in America a capitalist in the sense of owning individually through voting stock the means of production in a modern capitalist-intensive society.  Although he never followed through on his vision, he called for perfecting the institutions of money, credit, and taxation to broaden ownership of productive capital in an ownership society as the only free-enterprise way to narrow the wealth gap both within and among nations.  This devolution of economic power is the only way to assure that both legitimacy and power proceed from the bottom up rather than from the top down, which is the essential difference between the traditionalist conservatives and their NeoConservative opposites.

The NeoCons are enthusiastic about co-opting both of the major parties in America.  The so-called death of the NeoCons in the swamps of Iraq and Afghanistan/Pakistan, as Mark Twain would say, has been exaggerated.  The NeoCon strategists are happy that McCain won the Republican nomination because they backed him in the primaries of the Year 2000 against George W. Bush, which is why they survived only in the Department of Defense and were banned from the White House until 9/11 gave them the opportunity to penetrate the entire federal government.

The NeoCons joyfully welcomed the selection of Governor Sarah Palin as McCain’s vice-presidential nominee because it activated their hopes to acquire borrowed roots in the religious right so that they would not have to make an alliance with it as outsiders.  She could be a loose cannon on a rolling deck because she has strong principles and will fight for them, but the NeoCons are confident that she has no idea what is at stake and through her own ignorance can be co-opted. 

The confidence of the most influential NeoCon leaders may be their own undoing, because they are already overplaying their hand by promoting absurdities in their attacks on Islam and Muslims. 

A bizarre example was the Washington Times article by Frank Gaffney in mid-September about the next financial catastrophe to befall America.  As the master ideologue in the current generation of NeoConservatives, Gaffney is exploiting the financial meltdown in the middle of the 2008 elections to zero in on a new issue, namely, the dangers of rogue finance.  His bogey man is the rapidly growing sector of Islamic finance, known as Shari’ah-compliant banking.  Of course, Islamic finance calls for investment in asset backed instruments that actually produce real wealth and bring a reliable return on investment, which is the very opposite of Wall Street’s penchant for investment in debt and in debt derivitives, as well as in currency speculation, which can and did result in a mammoth ponzi scheme that inevitably had to implode. 

Gaffney warns as demonizer in chief, “Shari’ah, of course, is the term the Islamists use to describe the ruthlessly repressive, totalitarian program they believe should govern every aspect of the lives of faithful Muslims.  It is also the instrument they intend to use to rule the world.” 

Confusing the classical code of human rights, known as the normative principles of jurisprudence or maqasid al shari’ah, with the totalitarian reversal of all the basic principles of Islamic jurisprudence could be excused perhaps as mere ignorance.  But, Gaffney is not ignorant.  He cites as an authority David Yerushalmi of the Society of Americans for National Existence (SANE), who is mapping all the mosques in America as hotbeds of evil and destruction, to be watched and presumably, when the time is right, to be demolished.  Yerushalmi even presented a document to members of Congress, which he later retracted under pressure, urging the establishment of a law providing that any Muslim who professes adherence to Islam or Islamic rules should be punished by twenty years in prison.

The article by Gaffney in the middle of an election during a financial scare that could be exploited politically is not the product of a mere kibitzer in American foreign policy.  Gaffney hails from the staff of Senator Scoop Jackson, the influential Democratic senator from Boeing country (Washington State), who almost single-handedly funded the U.S. space industry against the Communist threat.  Gaffney joined as a disciple of Richard Perle, who was “there as the beginning” a decade earlier in the mid-60s when the NeoCons first penetrated Congress through Senator Jackson’s office.  Gaffney joined the Reagan Administration as second-in-command to Perle, when Perle became Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear Forces and Arms Control.  Gaffney than rose to become the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy.  Although the U.S. Senate refused to confirm him in this position, for awhile Gaffney in actual power outranked the Secretary of State in foreign policy.  The subsequent history of Gaffney is well known as perhaps the NeoCons’ chief ideologue.  In other words, when Gaffney speaks, people listen.

The second most absurd attempt to demonize Islam and Muslims occurred about the same time when an Israeli citizen funded a mammoth project to distribute millions of DVDs attacking Islam in major newspapers throughout the swing states.  The full background of this venture is now known and will become public soon.  Since it is closely linked to the Republican Party, the question now is whether both John McCain and Sarah Palin will demonstrate their well-deserved reputation for cracking down on corruption by renouncing both this DVD scam and the NeoConservative movement that generated it.

Despite their great hopes of capturing Sarah Palin and her 60-million devoted followers as an independent power base, the NeoConservatives’ crude power grabs may boomerang, because principle and power in Washington are each other’s mortal enemies.  Unlike Henry Kissinger, the ultimate guru of the mainline foreign policy establishment in America, who does not take anybody with principles seriously, the NeoCons fear anyone who has principles in conflict with their own.  They have reason to fear Sarah Palin as their nemesis, because she can lead an interfaith movement to restore America against its enemies. 

Both of the major parties in America have the potential to seize the moment and to bring to fruition the world religions’ call for peace, prosperity, and freedom through compassionate justice.