It would be frightening if every Arab and every Muslim thought like Osama Bin Laden, would it not? Of course it would, because over six million of those people live here in the U S of A That number is greater than the total populations of Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Israel and every Persian Gulf state not including Saudi Arabia and Iraq. Six million businessmen, politicians, physicians, lawyers, college professors, students, taxicab drivers, grocery store owners, gas station owners and simple American citizens.
The faith of Islam is a religion that supports peace, in fact Muslims all over the globe greet one another by saying “Salam,” which means peace. The word peace was first introduced to the Arabian Peninsula, present-day Saudi Arabia, by Islam in the 7h century AD in a hope to unite the feuding tribes to whom peace meant nothing. Nowhere in the Quran can anyone find a verse that says killing civilians, or even waging war, is right, let alone urged. Individuals like Osama Bin Laden, a product of a politically corrupt society, believe that the alternative is Islam since secularism and capitalism mean oppression and terrible economic conditions. Muslim scholars would all agree that Bin Laden does not represent Islam or Muslims, but instead he represents the Al-Qaida terrorist network.
September 11, 2001 was, among many other things, a day that united Americans, unfortunately Muslims and Arabs in America were not only excluded from this unity, but also targeted for hate crimes by some fellow Americans. These crimes are committed by those who think that everyone who “looks” Muslim is connected with terrorism just like those hijackers who thought that every American is a cause of their miseries.
Some Arab and Muslim Americans have been denied admission into airplanes, insulted in public, and they have been talked to in unkind words. What’s worse is that four crimes of murder since September I I might have been committed primarily due to the way the victims looked; one was against a Sikh who lived in Arizona and another one against a Christian Arab in California. Over 50 mosques in the states have been attacked and received phone calls stating that they should go back home-not knowing that “home” is right where that mosque stands!
Those who kill innocent children in Algeria, blow up buses in Cairo and Manila, bomb embassies and other government buildings, hijack airplanes and use them as missiles to hit skyscrapers full of working people, merely to deliver a wrong message in the name of Islam, are against everything Islam claims to be. However, Al-Qaida terrorist group does not represent Islam, it represents a few radical people. America is too great to be changed by ignorance, just as Islam is too peaceful to be represented by savages!
Vahal Abdulrahman
Political Science, ’03