The War Against Muslims

Posted on Fri, Apr. 23, 2004

MIDDLE EAST
Muslims suffer the most under radical Islam
BY FRIDA GHITIS
Miami Herald

For hundreds of Muslims families in the Middle East, the events of this week have changed life forever. To the rest of the world, the most recent bombings represented just another horror in an age of carnage. But with scores dead and hundreds injured in blasts throughout the region, thousands of surviving mothers, brothers, sons and daughters' lives will never be the same. And that's just from this week's killings.

Suicide bombings in Southern Iraq, more blasts in Riyadh, the Saudi Arabian capital and a massive terrorist plot involving chemical weapons discovered in Jordan, which authorities said would have killed some 20,000 people -- all point to the greatest fallacy about the current campaign by militant Islamists. The common view holds that this is a war of East vs. West, of militant fundamentalist Islam vs. the United States and its allies. The reality is quite different. Radical Islam is at war against the majority of the world's Muslims, who have no desire to live under the militants' reading of Islamic law.

The Basra massacre was most likely the work of Islamic-inspired fighters. Suicide bombings are the trademark of fundamentalist terrorism. In Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Osama bin Laden, radical Islamism has already left its terrorist signature in previous attacks.
It is Muslims, however, that terrorists are killing in the largest numbers by far. More important, it is Muslims whose governments and societies the militants ultimately want to dominate. Today's Muslim world is the final prize for the winner of the conflict.

Followers of the al Qaeda ideology have already shown what kind of government and what kind of society they pursue. Afghanistan had the dubious distinction of embodying that fundamentalist fantasy under Taliban rule. From Afghanistan we know that the biggest losers from a fundamentalists' victory will be Muslim women. But anyone who does not want to live in a world where religious authorities dictate every aspect of daily life, where thought and expression are strictly controlled and where infractions against ancient religious codes are punished by beheadings or stonings, also stands to lose if Islamists succeed.

The No. 1 enemy of Islamic radicals is modernity. Anything that moves society forward, away from their understanding of what life was like in seventh century Arabia, where Islam was born, is a threat.

That's one reason why Muslims and non-Muslims incorrectly view this as a conflict between East and West. Islamists view the West, led by the United States, as the tip of the modernity spear. They are probably right about that. But most people in the Arab world do not want to live by seventh-century rules. They may not want all that America stands for, but they do want human rights, economic opportunity and progress.
The Muslim majorities -- tragically for them and dangerously for us -- have failed to speak out against this campaign. As the controversial Muslim writer Irshad Manji says, ''the Muslim world has used the West -- the so-called oppressive West -- as a weapon of mass distraction for a long time.'' Muslims, she says, have been successfully intimidated. Voices of dissent have been silenced, and people who ''devour'' the Western lifestyle in private, publicly speak out against America.

In the end, however, they are the ones with the most to lose from their silence. If the fundamentalists win, the consequences for the West will pale in comparison to the suffering that will befall hundreds of millions of Arabs and Muslims. Even before the war is over, they are already the ones suffering the most painful losses.
Frida Ghitis writes about world affairs. She is the author of The End of Revolution: A Changing World in the Age of Live Television.''
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