Outrage and Silence

Thomas Friedman editorializes in the NYT It is hard not to notice two contrasting stories that have run side by side during the past week. One is the story about the violent protests in the Muslim world triggered by a report in Newsweek (which the magazine has now retracted) that U.S. interrogators at Guantánamo Bay desecrated a Koran by throwing it into a toilet. In Afghanistan alone, at least 16 people were killed and more than 100 wounded in anti-American rioting that has been linked to that report. I certainly hope that Newsweek story is incorrect, because it would be outrageous if U.S. interrogators behaved that way.

I find it outrageous that you only hope it is incorrect.

That said, though, in the same newspapers one can read the latest reports from Iraq, where Baathist and jihadist suicide bombers have killed 400 Iraqi Muslims in the past month - most of them Shiite and Kurdish civilians shopping in markets, walking in funerals, going to mosques or volunteering to join the police. Yet these mass murders - this desecration and dismemberment of real Muslims by other Muslims - have not prompted a single protest march anywhere in the Muslim world. And I have not read of a single fatwa issued by any Muslim cleric outside Iraq condemning these indiscriminate mass murders of Iraqi Shiites and Kurds by these jihadist suicide bombers, many of whom, according to a Washington Post report, are coming from Saudi Arabia.

They are afraid. They know they can issue fatwas against the US, and we won't target them, but they know that the terrorists have no compuction about targeting other Muslims.

The Muslim world's silence about the real desecration of Iraqis, coupled with its outrage over the alleged desecration of a Koran, highlights what we are up against in trying to stabilize Iraq - as well as the only workable strategy going forward. The challenge we face in Iraq is so steep precisely because the power shift the U.S. and its allies are trying to engineer there is so profound - in both religious and political terms. Religiously, if you want to know how the Sunni Arab world views a Shiite's being elected leader of Iraq, for the first time ever, think about how whites in Alabama would have felt about a black governor's being installed there in 1920. Some Sunnis do not think Shiites are authentic Muslims, and are indifferent to their brutalization.

At the same time, politically speaking, some Arab regimes prefer to see the pot boiling in Iraq so the democratization process can never spread to their countries.

It will happen, whether they like it or not.

That's why their official newspapers rarely describe the murders of civilians in Iraq as a massacre or acts of terror. Such crimes are usually sanitized as "resistance" to occupation. Salama Na'mat, the Washington bureau chief for the London-based Arabic daily Al Hayat, wrote the other day: "What is the responsibility of the [Arab] regimes and the official and semiofficial media in the countries bordering Iraq in legitimizing the operations that murder Iraqis? ... Isn't their goal to thwart [the emergence of] the newborn democracy in Iraq so that it won't spread in the region?" (Translation by Memri.)

In identifying the problem, though, Mr. Na'mat also identifies the solution. If you want to stop a wave of suicide bombings, the likes of which we are seeing in Iraq, it takes a village. I am a big believer that the greatest restraint on human behavior is not laws and police, but culture and religious authority. It is what the community, what the village, deems shameful. That is what restrains people. So how do we get the Sunni Arab village to delegitimize suicide bombers?

Inside Iraq, obviously, credible Sunnis have to be brought into the political process and constitution-drafting, as long as they do not have blood on their hands from Saddam's days. And outside Iraq, the Bush team needs to be forcefully demanding that Saudi Arabia and other key Arab allies use their media, government and religious systems to denounce and delegitimize the despicable murder of Muslims by Muslims in Iraq. If the Arab world, its media and its spiritual leaders, came out and forcefully and repeatedly condemned those who mount these suicide attacks, and if credible Sunnis were given their fair share in the Iraqi government, I am certain a lot of this suicide bombing would stop, as happened with the Palestinians. Iraqi Sunnis would pass on the intelligence needed to prevent these attacks, and they would deny the suicide bombers the safe houses they need to succeed. That is the only way it stops, because we don't know who is who. It takes the village - and right now the Sunni Arab village needs to be pressured and induced to restrain those among them who are engaging in these suicidal murders of innocents. The best way to honor the Koran is to live by the values of mercy and compassion that it propagates.

That is true

Dale Franks blogged If Islam does propagate such mercy and compassion, then aren't Muslim clerics vociferously criticizing the killing of their fellow Muslims at every opportunity? Why isn't this a constant refrain every Friday in Mosques? Indeed, while we're on the subject, why have women been forbidden to drive, own property, or vote—for all that voting is worth in an autocracy—in the Muslim world? While we're on the subject, what about female genital mutilation or "honor killings"? Then, of course, there's Sudan, where quite a lot of people are being regularly killed—although the UN assures us that it's not genocide—mainly for not being Muslim. I mean, for all this talk about the compassion and mercy of The Religion of Peace™, why does there seem to be so little of it in the Muslim world? If Islam "propagates" those gentle qualities of mercy why is the Mideast such a nasty, brutish place to live?

Clearly, there is something wrong with the propagation machinery. The two opinions that immediately occur to one are either a) that Mideastern culture is so backward and barbaric that the sheer brutality of the culture acts as a barrier for Islam's propagation of mercy, or b) Islam does no such propagation. Either way, it strikes me as inconsistent to complain that Muslims seem indifferent to Muslim terrorism, even when directed at Muslims, then to point out the compassionate nature of Islam. Either the people calling themselves Muslims are not, in fact, good Muslims at all, or Islam itself is not a significant force for compassion.

Dr. Steven Taylor blogged Certainly is the a remarkable disconnect here where a brief story about the desecration of a book, holy though it may be to millions, and the actual violence against people (and against mosques) does not evoke similar rage. The strategy to which he refers, and I think he does so in a somewhat vague fashion, is to find a way to apply cultural and religious to the problem. All true, yet also difficult to achieve. He does recommend, and I have to agree with him, that it is imperative to et Sunni politicians prominently involved in the constitution-writing process. This, too, may be difficult to achieve.