No sooner than the slaughter of innocents in Oslo, Norway was dismissed as was the accused assailant than on of the Sentinel’s contributing columnists slipped right back into a litany of anti-Islamic generalizations I’ve read before. Aug. 6: “We need perspective on Norway’s terror attack.”
The noun/adjective, Islamist, has any number of usages, not all related to some form of “fundamentalism.” One can use the term to denote “a scholar who is knowledgeable in Islamic studies; a learned person especially in the humanities; someone who by long study has gained mastery in one or more disciplines.” Or, it can mean ” … an orthodox Muslim.”
The Sentinel columnist said that “Many Norwegians resent immigration of so many Muslims,” as well as multiculturalism, increased crime rates, rapes of girls as young as 12 throughout Scandinavia and the cost of providing welfare to these newcomers. There is resentment and outrage that citizens “know that the criminals will be protected by multicultural laws from being identified,” They denounce multiculturalism, as if Europe was some homogeneous entity. These are old canards often used against “others.”
The culprit responsible for the slaughter of people in a mass shooting spree and a bombing was shrugged off, and all Islamists could once more be the whipping dogs.
A contributor to Religion Dispatches notes that the assassin’s “atrocious acts, in fact, were a veritable 21st century media strategy.” Cold War-era communist terrorist groups too, “produced extensive texts to communicate their revolutionary theories; their authors wanted to be — and indeed were — intelligible to a wider public that either was not or was not yet radicalized …” The Norway assassin, Anders Behring Breivik, appeals not only to a slim network of extremists, but to those who claim that the “Islamization of Europe” is a matter of life and death for European and Western civilization.
Breivik admiringly and extensively quotes another writer: “In more and more cities across the continent, non-Muslims are being harassed, robbed, mugged, raped, stabbed and even killed by Muslims. Native Europeans are slowly becoming second-rate citizens in their own countries.” Screeds like this are repeated over and over again in different forums, he points out.
He claimed to be acting on behalf of Christendom, but his claims could just as easily be used as a strategy that can adhere to nationalism, to race, to anything that makes people identifiably “different.” He believed that Europe is homogeneous — religiously, ethnically, and culturally, though it is fraught with a history of centuries of migrations, cultural, ethnic and racial mingling.
There are among the Islamists many thinkers who do embrace representative government, accept equal rights for women and non-Muslims. The ideas of justice and development are embraced as part of a strategy of moderation.
Raymond William Baker in “Islam without Fear: Egypt and the New Islamists” points out that “Often there are two extreme views represented by the secularists and the fundamentalists.” The New Islamists, he says, “belong to neither.” Their emphasis is on “constructive social action with an emphasis on educational reforms.” Theirs is a “preference for culture to politics.”
Ad hominems that treat Islamists as if they are all the same without distinction are unfair because they’re inaccurate. There is, in the West, the Islamist too often, and too quickly associated with radicalism and violence. But there is too, the scholar, the learned persons, who by long study have gained mastery in one or more disciplines — and they exist right in our own community of Santa Cruz. Perhaps not in great numbers, but certainly up in the university on the hill. And I’ve listened, and noted how these young people are feeling the brunt of anti-Islamic rhetoric, and they are stressed about it.
Humanity, like this world we occupy, is developing and evolving, constantly. The only real issue is whether we can learn to develop or evolve cooperatively, or are we destined always to compete in any violent manner we think will get us “on top?”
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