Militant Patriotism and America's Jihad

By Matthew Riemer

Why is Islam portrayed as the volatile, unpredictable, and inherently violent religion of a different class of people, people who never took the last few enlightened steps so easily trod by the Western world? Why is Islam portrayed as the religion of people who are just now getting around to becoming "civilized", of people who are just now toying with the advanced and more mature concepts of democracy and capitalism?

Why is Christianity portrayed as the religion of the enlightened man of the post-Industrial Age, an age filled with gritty realism, but neither pessimism nor optimism. An age where moral giants reluctantly come to painstaking judgments that reign down on all of humanity like God's grace gone bad.

Why do the media and religious scholars now suddenly admit to thinking that Islam was violent all along? (They just didn't have the nerve to say it in the past but they do now, right?) Such boldness comes under the cover of widespread suspicion and incomplete analysis of the real intent of Islam. Yet why do they not see the inherent violence and militancy in Christianity, or any religion for that matter when its followers become dogmatic zealots?

Surely it was Christianity that declared the first "real" jihad against the uncivilized, barbaric, heathen Muslims (who, simply to respect the truth, were far more advanced than their high and mighty Western assailants) when, in 1095, Pope Urban II said, "Let's get 'em!"

This was the first "real" jihad in the sense that a war was being declared against not only a particular region and religion, but on an entire way of life, an entire people and culture. Indeed, Arthur Goldschmidt Jr. in his classic introductory text, A Concise History of the Middle East, notes that, "The general effect of the Christian onslaught, though, was to make Islam more militant by the twelfth century than it had ever been before."

Ahmed Rashid, noted foreign journalist and author of Taliban, offers this eye-opening insight: "The Taliban were a direct throwback to the military religious orders that arose in Christendom during the Crusades to fight Islam -- disciplined, motivated and ruthless in attaining their aims."

At the time of the Crusades, the Western world didn't have the luxury of pointing out travesties that had been carried out by the Muslim world against Christendom to perhaps at least partially justify their actions and hatred. For example, like the destruction and rape of their environment by the Muslims, or perhaps, the "discovery" of Europe and the proceeding subjugation and enslavement of their people with a concomitant eradication of cultural solidarity and identity."

Of course, today, those same bloodthirsty actions have occurred, though not by Easterners against Westerners (excuse the vague terminology), but just the other way around. The concept of jihad, if understood as a ready willingness to defend one's self, one's culture, and one's religion from foreign interference, ill will, or meddling, combined with a romantic sense of sacrifice towards those goals, seems to be inherent in all peoples.

If you are under attack, if you are being persecuted, if your culture, identity, and religion are in imminent danger of expiration, possibly even on your home turf, then you'll fight back and try to repel the enemy. This tendency or response seems only natural.

Even if one's interpretation was to understand jihad with the added dimension of the right or duty to spread one's message throughout the world, even with the occasional bloodshed, it would then more resemble the decree of, say, manifest destiny or that of imperialism or missionaries. Still, though less so, this makes perfect sense and seems natural.

I have to admit that wanting to spread one's "message" throughout the world or the attempt to explore and maybe "acquire" new lands does seem fairly natural from the point of view of the human animal. The line must be drawn, however, when it comes to the use of extensive violence to achieve these expansionary and somewhat megalomaniacal goals. At some point, a morally responsible individual or group must say no more. No more violence, no more bloodshed.

At some point in the cycle of violence, we'll find ourselves on the receiving end. At another point we'll find ourselves doling it out. Sometimes our actions are more reactions and sometimes less so. Who's really retaliating against whom? Who's really responding and who's really instigating that response? Over time, cause and effect blur like the blades of a fan stuck on high for a thousand years. Who/what is right and who/what is wrong? Who/what is moral, immoral, amoral? Judge and judged? Aggressor or defender? Militant, fundamentalist, realist?

Jihad has now suddenly become one of the media's favorite buzzwords. From Newsweek to the local bookstore, from the New York Times to shows on National Public Radio (NPR), it is getting a lot of exposure as the explanation for terrorism. It is portrayed as Islam's dirty little secret that puts everything into perspective. "Oh, that's why they're so violent and unreasonable."

But is not the U.S. waging its own jihad on "terrorism" and anything loosely associated with it? Has the U.S. not initiated a jihad against anything that challenges U.S. hegemony for that matter? Are there not t-shirts for sale at the local mall t-shirt kiosk depicting a bull's-eye superimposed over the face of one Osama bin Laden (capitalism at its most tasteful)? Are the cries of war not reverberating from the mountaintops, at this very moment, gently stirring all the miniature American flags (probably imported) now cluttering the valley below?

Are there not zealots proclaiming that Arab or Muslim blood will be spilled for the offences of 9-11? Is not our President rallying us to bless America in God's name and "stomp out the evildoers"? Was it not our President who invoked religious metaphor when he described our forthcoming battle as a "crusade"? Is it not America that has become intolerant of the "other," of dissidence, of debate, of questioning, of asking why?

Is it not America that has become what it most despises? In short, is it not America that seems bloodthirsty, reactionary, emotionally charged, fueled by religious and cultural divides, swearing to defend itself at all costs from a hidden, amorphous enemy comprising probably less than one hundred thousand soldiers worldwide? Is it not America itself who has now become the "terrorist" in one of our most fanciful of fabrications?

[Matthew Riemer has written for years about a myriad of topics, such as: philosophy, religion, psychology, culture, and politics. He studied Russian language and culture for five years and traveled in the former Soviet Union in 1990.He lives in the United States.


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