The Long War?

The War on Terror feeds and fattens on human fear wherever it is politically expedient. The War on Terror machine is becoming enormous on this diet of human fear. In the UK, the director of the spy agency MI5 has recently alleged that 30 terror plots are being planned, with help from al Qaeda operatives in Pakistan, with 200 presumably Islamist networks and more than 1,600 individuals under surveillance.

And to investigate these more effectively, the Director, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller affirmed that MI5 staff now numbers 2,800, “an increase of over 50 percent since 9/11.” The agency has settled into a long, long “war.”

And last Friday, Prime Minister Blair agreed; “I think it’s absolutely right that it will last a generation… It’s a very long and deep struggle, but we have to …take the fight to those people who want to entice young people into something wicked and violent but utterly futile.”

Accordingly, two weeks ago a government program to monitor students was uncovered by the British newspaper The Guardian. Wakkas Khan, president of a national Islamic student group, worried: "It is clearly targeting Muslim students and treating them to a higher level of suspicion and scrutiny. It sounds like you're guilty until you're proven innocent…. It is potentially the widest infringement of the rights of Muslim students that there ever has been in this country."

And responding to the high level of fear, Massoud Shadjareh, the chairman of the Islamic Human Rights Commission, cautioned; “Although we recognize that there is a real threat, the suggestion that we could even face a nuclear threat will only contribute to paranoia rather than safety and security.”

But there is also so much investment in fear here in the USA. Congressman Keith Ellison has so much work ahead. Can we help this newly elected Muslim to clean up the terrible mess the country is in? Can we afford not to?

Last week Forbes business magazine reported that, “The U.S. armed services have requested a $160 billion supplemental appropriation to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the remainder of fiscal year 2007 - a staggering amount.”

Democrats (and some Republicans) object to these “supplemental” bills that avoid the accountability in normal spending bills. The White House has used such tricks to divert hundreds of billions to the military industrial complex. Coming after the Republican political losses and the resignation of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, the costs alone will force withdrawal plans.

Of course, terror is a terrible thing. However, we must distinguish it from vandalism and other forms of political violence. As citizens, must not allow minor crimes to be cheaply politicized. And as Americans, we must not allow the collateral damage of Shock and Awe tactics and the use of white phosphorus against civilians to go unchallenged either.

The recent bombings of the Bajaur madrasa and in Gaza surely resemble state terror; though not to the extent that a bomb is a crowded street would be. The militants in the North West Frontier are dangerous. But we must ask if all alternatives were tried.

We must loudly condemn Iraqi insurgents who kill the innocent. To blame the USA for everything is infantile. And yet we Muslims must note: though the CIA may use tactics of rendition to send detainees to illegal torture, the actual torturers in the dungeons of Amman and Cairo are Muslims. How can this be?

Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, has written an 11-page letter describing his 2003 abduction at the hands of the CIA and Italian secret service. He has written that he was kept in an Egyptian cell with no toilet and no lights, where "roaches and rats walked across my body.” He would be strapped to an iron rack nicknamed "the Bride" and zapped with electric stun guns. He has lost hearing in one ear from repeated beatings, and his formerly black hair has turned all white.

How can Muslims behave so cruelly to others, in the prisons of Egypt, the villages of Darfur, the subways of London? We must recall that even Kuffar have potential for salvation; it is not our role to punish them. We must recall that other religions will last until the end of time, and that other Prophets have been sent as a mercy from Allah. To be righteous, avoid being self-righteous. We cannot think of our selves as more blessed or more human than any others. We Muslims should not dehumanize ourselves, or others.

But the rapid alienation of our recent generations is not exclusive to Muslims. In “Bowling Alone,” Sociologist Robert Putnam documents how commuting, television, patterns of socialization and to a much lesser extent the breakdown of family structure have had a hugely negative impact on civic engagement. We become socially isolated. When we do not learn and work together we lose humanity. Our society falls.

In Israel, writer David Grossman, who lost his son in the Lebanon conflict this summer, last week mourned his nation as well; “Israel's quick descent into the heartless, essentially brutal treatment of its poor and suffering; this indifference to the fate of the hungry, the elderly, the sick and the disabled, all those who are weak, this equanimity of the State of Israel in the face of human trafficking or the appalling employment conditions of our foreign workers, which border on slavery, to the deeply ingrained institutionalized racism against the Arab minority…By our sword we shall live and by our sword we shall die and the sword shall devour forever. Maybe this would explain the indifference with which we accept the utter failure of the peace process, a failure that has lasted for years and claims more and more victims.”

But the same could be said for many Muslim nations as well, with their authoritarian, closed societies, which even seek to influence us here. God help us all! Pakistan, Israel, Britain, the USA; we all must wake up from this nightmare, dehumanizing War on Terror. What can help our ignorant souls? Literature and Art can help open the blind eyes of the mind and heart, and help us understand how to apply the wisdom of the Deen. And deeper, more generous social Networks can help us bridge with others unlike ourselves as well as bond with each other. The answer is not simply to continue shopping, no. You and I must communicate much more openly to truly realize our life together, and build a better world. We must feel the responsibility, not mistrust. We must wake up.