The License to Target Islam: War and Theology Sanitize Prejudice

(Third and last of three articles)

East Meredith, New York

September 8, 2008

America could better cultivate relations with the six million Arab and Muslim Americans to re-open channels of diplomacy with the 1.3 billion Muslims of the world. Arab and Muslim Americans should not be made to feel responsible for deepening East-West conflict and for the cruelty of politics in their countries of origin.

We seem to be unable to shed our hostility toward Islam as long as we are shocked with oil prices, feel lost in Iraq, seem overwhelmed in Afghanistan and look helpless in our mediation of the Arab-Israeli conflict. We resort to theories of spurious social and religious rationale to cover an incoherent foreign policy.

In order to deal with our collective guilt for resorting to war as a primary strategy in resolution of conflict we proclaim that we are fighting just wars. We employ two major defensive strategies to rationalize our aggression.

First, we justify our excessive militarism through a simplistic theory of “culture clash.” Second, we rationalize our foreign policy in the Middle East with political theology.

In his book The Clash of Civilizations, the Harvard ideologue, Samuel Huntington, has popularized the culture clash theory which posits that “Islam” and the “West” are two ideologically contrasting civilizations which are doomed to continuous confrontation. For Huntington, the key source of conflict between the West and Islam is contrast of values. Huntington’s framework of inevitable conflict with Muslim civilization has been refuted by many scholars. The culture-clash theory gives minimal consideration for political variables such as the economic contrast, gender gap, corrupt leadership, poor civic education, greed for resources, hard line diplomacy and scant intercultural exchange.

The Bush “axis of evil” policy is affected by the culture clash-theory. The “clash” theory provides a moral platform to statesmen who advocate hawkish foreign policy, punitive sanctions, extensive troop presence overseas and massive defense budgets. Culture is in Huntington’s view misconceived as political software. But social scientists tell us that culture is a “way of living”, rather than a “way of governing”.

A second emerging strategy of rationalizing aggressive foreign policy in the Middle East is based on a revived church-based Crusader mentality. The Christian Zionists of today resemble the Medieval Crusaders.

This branch of fundamental Christianity ties personal salvation to a belief in the returning Christ, the warrior-savior. Many consider themselves Christian Zionists. They believe that Christ will return to battle with Muslims in Israel when the world ends. And it will end soon, the fundamentalists warn. This theology predicts that a new era of peace will start after Christ and his soldiers win the battle against Palestinian and other Arab Muslim infidels. In preparation for the return of Jesus, this apocalyptic world view demands unconditional support of Israel.

Ironically, Christian Zionists are not clear on what happens to Jews when Christ returns to end the rule of the non-believers. Christian fundamentalists are in a bind to justify their conditional, self-serving and temporary love for Jews.

The cult of Christian Zionism has already penetrated American culture. Extreme evangelicals sell personal salvation and colonial, US-supported Israeli policies in one package; they peddle salvation as a life insurance policy.

A war-oriented foreign policy, a xenophobic political theory and a theology recasting Jesus as a Crusader have set America on a dangerous political fault line for generations to come. Of the many policies I reject but can understand in the political conservative agenda, it is not pro-life thinking, strict immigration, private health care or the ascendancy of militarism. What I really worry most about in the extreme right ideology of religious America, is the rejection of the validity of other faiths, the blessing of social injustice when applied to Palestinians and the covert support of wars of choice. Unless we change our foreign policy and the socio- religious rationale that supports it we are destined to clash endlessly in the future with the rest of the world, not only with Muslim societies.