@asbie
Yes, it's daunting. Like David said, this isn't going to resolve in our lifetime. But we have to angle things in the right direction so that this can be resolved in someone else's.
I've gone a really long time without just blasting away part of a thread page with a huge novel, so I am going to break my hiatus just to write this one, because I've found you surprisingly easy to talk to in the past, nhbh, and just last night I was watching my mother as she was watching the news, and she had just been talking to her friends in France. They said that they're moving immediately. They have a date.
They blame the refugee situation, they blame the Muslims, and they told my mother to be worried about my sister, who is in the UK, because "things are getting bad there, too." And my mother turned to me and said, "Just the other day, I was yelling at a friend of mine for spreading hate by posting an anti-Muslim thing on Facebook...It's really hard--it's getting really hard--to keep defending them."
I understand how she feels, and I understand how you feel, nhbh. I understand the frustration, but it's misplaced, and more than ever, we need to keep our eye on the ball.
It's not to say that I have no problem with Islam or that I think Islam today does not cause problems. I do, and I've talked about that at length here, but in this case, we have to stop and think carefully. It's not Islam, but that's a common thread. And it's the brightest one of the bunch, it's the easiest for us to identify.
Therefore, when someone commits these attacks, realistically, we should know that they aren't just doing it because they're brainless and they thought they saw "kill a bunch of people" in the Quran. Otherwise, these attacks would be happening all the time everywhere, an attack for every Muslim. There's some other elements that come together: feeling marginalized just enough, lacking just enough empathy, anger at the state of the world misplaced, feeling hopeless and powerless and finding identity and belonging and power with a small group that, like any other group in the world that is so inclined, can find ample "evidence" in the Quran to swear that their way is The Truth.
But that's when you look closer. If you stick with your first glance, you see "others," you see subgroups and "enclaves" as someone here once wrote, you see hijabs and mosques and the alarm bells go off because our gut reaction for so many of us--people like you and surely people like I, had I not taken the life detour that I did, nhbh--is to think that all Muslims are somehow culpable, complicit on some minor (or major, depending on who you ask) scale, for the common thread is Islam. After all, has anyone confirmed who led these attacks? Who here even really asked? Do we need to?
The truth is that the problem is complicated. And we have to be careful when we try to treat a complicated condition. If we try the wrong things, we can make it worse. By now, you should be assured of nothing more than the fact that an emotional, angry response to Muslims as a whole is not an effective treatment. It's inflammatory.
How has the world changed for the better after our extreme reaction to Islam in the United States after 9/11? I can tell you that in the immediate aftermath, it marginalized American Muslims and forced them to become more estranged, made them more removed from society. When we attacked Iraq, the entire Muslim world was watching what we did there, and kids like my husband were sitting in front of the television, watching the news and seeing the devastation and dreaming of going off to fight against the West, and then believing it, unquestioned, when people said the West is evil, the West is with Israel to destroy the Muslims, the West is our enemy, the only way is to unite the ummah.
We should not excuse the people who are so weak, so egotistical, so selfish, so insecure that they try to redeem themselves and earn "respect" and "power" from this violence and use the oppression of Muslims as a decoration when they go to become martyrs, like the Boston bomber who truly didn't seem to care all that much about Islam prior to deciding to make himself the "hero" of the oppressed. But we should understand them. We should know our enemy, and we should understand what makes them. And we should do everything in our power to cut off the taps that they siphon from.
At the same time, our job now is to support the Muslims who are strongly condemning these attacks. To support those who make the case that this is un-Islamic. And in a system where everyone is right and no one is wrong, the majority will make the rules. So let's lend ourselves to these Muslims to make them the majority. That is what we can do now. That is the only thing we can do that will not further aggravate the problem. It is hard--harder than the alternatives--but it is the only real cure, and it is the only fair one.
I will be hoping that France does not make the same mistake we made years ago. And I will be hoping that all of you here (you are some of the most intelligent and considerate people I have the pleasure of interacting with) will do what you can, and at least help us angle this thing a little bit. Progress will be slow, it always is, but, hey. Do it for David's nephews' children.
Best thing I have read on this thread.
Topic: Paris shootings, explosions leave at least 120 dead says news