Deus Vult

After President Obama spoke in Cairo last week to the Muslim world, reaching out to the people whom President Bush had slapped away for years, you could hear neoconservative heads exploding all over the place. Ed Cline in particular accused Obama of making "obeisance" to his supposed Muslim masters, and pressed all the usual hot buttons in urging a continued holy war against Islam.

My reaction to all this was "deus vult."

In 1095, Pope Urban II declared a crusade to "liberate" the Middle East from Muslim control. In reply, crowds of fired-up Christians yelled out "deus vult" - God wills it - and went on to slaughter horrendous numbers of Jews, Muslims and others in the name of God.

One wonders if God was ashamed of what had been done in the holy name.

For more than seven years, the Bush Administration waged the Global War on Terror as a religious war - precisely what should not have happened. From Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin's derision of Allah as a satanic idol while preaching in uniform to official military evangelizing of the local population in Iraq and Afghanistan to the biblical quotes on the president's daily Pentagon briefings, everything was cast in a stark my-God-can-kick-your-God's-butt light.

The problem with a religious war is there can be no compromise and no middle ground. Anything less than total war is tantamount to surrender. Worse yet, it tells people of the opposing faith that they are the enemy, even if the vast majority of those people would never take up arms in such a war.

This is the dilemma in which we now find ourselves. President Bush and his crowd did indeed see Islam and all Muslims as the enemy, but how can you differentiate between "bad" Muslims and "good" Muslims? In a religious war, you ultimately cannot. Casting the battle against terrorist groups who follow a twisted view of Islam as a struggle against an entire faith guarantees that such a fight will go on forever, with new generations of recruits perpetually induced to sign up by whatever religious insult is offered at any one time.

Cline is most certainly wrong when he said that "Islam has been and is certainly now at war with the U.S. and with the West." How can a religious faith be at war with anything? If he had said that some people who follow a faction of Islam are at war with the US, he would be more correct.

Rather ironically, he also says that, "There is no reconciliation possible between...reason and faith... As with reason versus any other faith or religion, it is a matter of 'either-or.'" Considering that the previous Administration saw the world precisely in such black-and-white religious terms, it's an odd argument for him to make.

After 9/11, the entire world was with us in our battle with al Qaeda - especially the Muslim world, who rightly saw Osama bin Laden and his murderous ilk as a threat to them as well. But President Bush threw that all away, preferring to fight the War on Terror as a global crusade - with all the connotations that word implies. The Administration and the larger Republican Party did everything they could to cast Muslims of all stripes as a vague and threatening Other, and all American Muslims were seen as potential traitors and terrorists. Is it any wonder that the Muslim world now sees us with deep suspicion, and is it any wonder that President Obama now has a lot of work to do to correct that image?

Let's look at it this way: suppose 9/11 had been carried out not by nineteen followers of bin Laden's perverted brand of Islam, but by nineteen followers of an apocalyptic Jewish sect. (And don't say "Jews would never do that" - look at Baruch Goldstein.) The vast majority of Jews loudly denounce what was done in their name and promise to root out the killers in their midst. And then the White House reacts by declaring war on Judaism itself, claiming that the religion is inherently violent and terroristic, no matter what actual Jews may say or do. The military goes on to invade and destroy Israel, desecrate the tallitot and tefillin of Jewish prisoners, and distribute Christian Bibles in Hebrew to convert local Jews to the "right" faith.

Makes you think, doesn't it?

President Obama was absolutely right last week in Cairo. We can no longer afford to treat 1.5 billion people as "less than" because they follow the same basic faith as do a band of fanatical killers. Such an approach would be tantamount to treating all Jews like Baruch Goldstein, or all Christians like Torquemada. If we want the Muslim world to live with us in peace, we have to live with them in peace, and that starts with treating them like adult human beings instead of religious untermenschen.