Robert Salaam: One man’s actions will affect loyal US Muslims
Digg
del.icio.us
Facebook
Reddit
Google
Stumble Upon
Fark
Newsvine
YahooBuzz
Bebo
Twitter
Independent Minds
There isn’t a word to describe the heartache, pain, and sheer disgust that I felt when I woke up yesterday morning. A Muslim serviceman can always expect to face questions about his loyalty. When I was in uniform, for instance - a converted black sergeant from New Jersey - a converted black sergeant from New York, Hassan Akbar, turned on his fellow soldiers and murdered two of them.
I served with professionals, and the most I got from my fellow Marines was a few off-colour jokes. But I count myself among the fortunate. I wouldn’t want to imagine what it’s like for Muslims serving now – especially those at Fort Hood. You pray there won’t be any issues. But you can’t be sure.
The actions of this madman cost us, the many Muslims have served this country honourably over the years, so much. I, like them, make no secret of my love of my faith as well as my country and my Corps. Like everyone else, young Muslims want to serve even over the objection of their parents: they want to be part of something, they want to be their bit. Many American Muslim military personnel have honourable discharges; some others gave the ultimate sacrifice, and are buried at Arlington Cemetry. I want to say to Christians: this murderer is no more one of us than the paedophile priest, the abortion doctor killer, or the millions of prisoners behind bars are part of you.
And yet already our military loyalties, our honour, and our integrity are being questioned. Most American Muslims today are going to get up, get ready for work, send their kids off to school, and pray that nothing stupid happens because of their faith. My hope is that the professionalism of most armed forces units will mean that casual jokes and debate will be the norm. But violence is also possible.
Meanwhile, some non-Muslims still believe that an entire religious community shares responsibility for the actions of one guy that we didn’t even know existed until yesterday. No other faith community is taken to task in this manner. I read the blogs and messageboards, and I understand people are upset – but the reaction is disheartening: calls for the expulsions of Muslims from the armed forces, or for a vetting process, or in a few cases for an all-out ban on Islam. So even as I make extra prayers and give Dua, I know that my fellow non-Muslim Americans would love to see me leave my country. I wonder where they would like me to go.
Robert Salaam is a blogger and former US Marine who converted to Islam shortly after 9/11
View all comments that have been posted about this article.
Offensive or abusive comments will be removed and your IP logged and may be used to prevent further submission. In submitting a comment to the site, you agree to be bound by the Independent Minds Terms of Service.
- Print Article
- Email Article
-
Click here for copyright permissions
Copyright 2009 Independent News and Media Limited
Comments
Giving people the benefit of the doubt has proven time and again to backfire in deaths of innocent people. Our tolerance has been used against us and it appears Islam and the West are on a collision course. As an Arab TV editor said "It is not true that all muslims are terrorists, but it is true that most terrorists are muslim", so what do you expect us to do?
These invasions started off as conquest for control energy resources and regions. They now look like its ending up as worldwide religious war between Muslims and Christians.
This smells of another false flag to me....
All too convenient....Dressed in full muslim gear, Shouting allah....
Why wasn't he killed?
REINVESTIGATE 9/11....
PLEASE WATCH THIS...
http://video.google.co.uk/videosearch?h
We have got to get past focusing on religion or ethnicity as the scapegoat of a motive for the actions of individuals. Until we know more (and we certainly do not know enough now to form opinions), I will be looking at these murders as the act of one madman acting on his own.
We have been sold a huge lie, a monumental lie...
http://video.google.co.uk/videosearch?h
To Hell as part of a Chritian crusadw no doubt one macho theistic bunch opressing another.
The sooner religions and gods forgotton and humanity nurtured the sooner such animalistic violence will be seen as an anachronistic example of stunted development.Ordinary decent americans don't go around slaughtering each other.
The US tragedy is the deluded aroused nuts spurred on by bigots zhock jock fundamentalists have accress to automatic weapons.
NO, there isn't. Americans have been bending over backwards to take care of Muslims since 9/11, and still we get this BS that Muslims "will pay the price" or that Americans will start thinking about Muslims as a tintype with monochromatic tones.
It's ridiculous, and it is grossly unfair.
What would help is if Muslims, instead of writing these whining predictions of what has NEVER happened — thereby SMEARING THE REST OF US, DAMMIT — would hit the streets en masse to protest violence in the name of Islam. Scream so loud that the leaders of the eight madhabs get scared they will lose their jobs if they don't stop praising it in mosques all over the world.
Do that. Otherwise you are failing Islam and playing false victim games.
http://video.google.co.uk/videosearch?h
How many peolpe have died in recent years in New York, London, Madrid, Bali, Morroo, Egypt etc. etc.? THOUSANDS!
And what is the one phrase people hear in connection with those murders? Allahu Akbar. There you go.
Dennis you blithering idiot.
What do you think is behind all the events of the last 15 years? Who started the fire? The Muslims or the Christians?
Check out this superb investigation and blow your mind....
http://video.google.co.uk/videosearch?h
Stop saying that this man is not one of you - because he is. He is a practicing muslim who shouted god is great when he was killing people. It's not your turn to do something about it. Sitting back and watching is not working.
This moview ill prove it....
It wasn't the boogeyman in the cave...
http://video.google.co.uk/videosearch?h
Instead, these traditionalists (whom I suspect you accepted to follow), rely solely on medieval traditions to explain away their modus operandi, and this what they teach their young (and anyone who converts to that now fake faith).
There is something profoundly evil within the teachings of traditional sunnis and shias islam. They breed sectarianism and encourage violence and mayhem.
There is no way this will change, but with tackling the root of the problem.
I see the root evil in wahabbism, a spin off of sunnism, and which has several times been used as agent provocateur towards shia muslim sectarians, working towards creating strife between the various sects, and other communities (within and without)...
If clerics, scholars are not willing to reform themselves, then the rest of us must force them to reform.
These medieval traditions in Islam are based on Hadith (traditions) collected by Imams Bukhari, Muslim and others (mostly Persians).
Most of the calls to Jihads, and the worst aspects of Islamism spawn from these writings, which are used to explain away the Quran too!
This has got to stop... The hadiths have to be burnt, the clerics must be banned and gagged, using the Quran as an ideological tool.
The Quran is the enemy of the Jihadist... The Hadith is their friends, remove the Hadith, and you win the battle for Peace. Peacemaking = Islam. They hijacked it to make it mean, Warmongering = Islam!
Otherwise, we are playing with the Devil, and it will only get worse... how can you explain intelligent people being brainwashed to let go of any reasonable means of thinking, and go fire a weapon at their colleagues?
or scientists looking into using n-weapons to obliterate a town, while they are supposed to follow a book that asks them to consider life as sacred above all else?
utter madness, and the psychiatrist in question in this case was mentally disturbed, dangerous and in need of being sectioned, but how many others out there mentally disturbed and perfect fodder for recruitment, maybe you one day? enough!
As a good Arabic reader, who de-brainwashed and decoupled myself from these noxious teachings, the Message is very different from what say the Taleban and other sectarians are doing.
It has nothing to do with a hostile media, it is just a plain fact, the Hadith teachings are nasty, and the scholars have been very clever hiding that, but now more and more clerics are reading those "nasty" nefarious Hadiths and applying them giving fatwas to Jihadists and others to create mayhem.
FYI, the Quran stipulates that it is self sufficient, and a foundation to build upon, not an end in itself.
With the Hadith (which are additions), we have the situation where time has frozen in the 9th century for the "muslims" and clerics want to recreate the medieval conditions of that time to produce a world-wide Islamic state
It is a deluded dream of grandeur, and it needs to be addressed, it won't go away...
The only way to solve the problem is to give all women equal rights in the Western world and to hell with Muslims having the monopoly on women. A woman keeps a man in check and a man keeps a woman in check: We compliment each other. If a man is free to do what men do, unchecked, then we will have beastly behaviour: Usually violence and dreams of world domination.
And why do the Muslims always drag up the Christians on such important issues like this? Why don't you accept there's a problem within the Muslim community? Or are you playing Jekyll and Hyde?
I think that in North America, a young country compared to others, history goes back to the time when the Pilgrims left for a new continent, due to persecution of the religious kind, or social (that was a time when kings ruled), for adventure or in search of a better life. Of course there were here and there also those who committed a crime and had to flee. The new continent was a land of oppotunity to start anew and perhaps even make a fortune. Well, as we know, some did make huge fortunes,, but the majority had - and have - to be content with the modest life they could muster with a lot of hard work. The point is, America's Pilgrims, having left their previous lives in different countries of Europe, found no reason to look back gratefully to their origins, most likely, even subconsciously obliterating their memories of it. So Americans in general, do not tend to think historically as other peoples do, who constantly refer to to their past which shaped their cultures, tradtions,attitudes, etc. And certainly, religion played - and still plays - an important part.
The labels of religion keep us all separate, all in bondage to tyranny that respects neither man nor God, but only the profit of war.
It would be too easy then to declare this case as another "terrorist act", but rather a personal reaction of a Muslim caught between his deep religious feelings, and his loyalty to the armed forces he was serving. Of course, this does not justify at all what he did, but at the end of the investigation, this issue should be taken in consideration and not just presented as the action of a crank running amok.
Still, there are those on 'our' side relishing it, thinking two wrongs make a right, and hoping it turns into another Holocaust, how civilised.
This is perhaps the most blatant racism I have seen other than the BNP. Why?
Who thinks this way except a person trained to think like a racist?
Every time I see Moslems, Jews and Christians congratulate each other on belonging to thw same monotheist club I chuckle.
Monotheism works one way, you take aspects of various religions and change it and form a new religion. You then declare everyone practicing the old religions damned and everyone else a a pagan or heathen.
The Jews did this taking the legal system and cosmology myths created by others in Mesopotamia and changing it to make it about them, then taking the monotheism and food taboos of Egypt, used it to take the land from the Cannanites and others like the Edomites (from who they took the name of their god "El" and then explained that 'El commanded them to commit genocide agaisnt the Edomites), next taking Zoroastrian elements, and finally heavily layering Greek philisophy on top during the development of rabbinic (modern) Judaism - ironically while reviling the Greeks under whom the Jews flourished due to the Greeks tolerant polytheistic polis system.
The Christains did it too and like the Jews vilifyined the preceeding religion and people, and like the Jews used this concpet to kill people from the preceeder religon. The Moselms did the same.
Turn on the radio and listen to a hardcore Evangelical broadcasts stateside and you realize that literally half of what they are talkign about is how the Pope the Antichrist.
People should understand Monothiesm for what it is, a step backwards in human progress, and inherently an expression of prejudice and debasement of others.
Believers in the "light" versions of these religions are relatively benign. Serious and fundamental believers of all three of these religions literally believe all outsiders are damned. Fundamentalist Jews believe it is an excuse to take others land and kill Palestinians at 100 to 1, fundamentalist Moslems literally believe it is their duty to make war on the Dar al-Harb, and Christians with the most benign sacred text have lkilled even more than both the others in the name of their religion.
What were the Macabbees really up to? They were the same as the Taliban. Antiochus could have cared less. What happened was most Jews were becoming synchrtists, enjoying religious freedom and adapting different aspects of different cultures they were interacting with under a freedom of religion regime. This enraged the fundamentalists who began killing . The Maccabees types were killing all the Jews who were not Jewish enough or as they used the term for worldly Jews: "Greeks." The rulers from thw north had to come down to break up the mess -- Just as some years later the fundamentalist Jews rioted against and mass murdered the worldly Jews in Alexandria (the riots between Jews and Greeks there are now known to mean riots between fundamentalist Jews and cosmopolitan Jews.) Ironically Hunnakah celebrates a movement that would kill 99% of Jews today for being profligate!
Islam and the West are not on a collision course. Religious fundamentalism applied to the view of the other, modernity,a nd human rights have been on a collision course since the "Abrahamic" religions first infected the previously tolerant world informed by ancient Greek tolerant values (whcih informed and gave birth to the best things in both Europe and the Middle East)
On the positive note Ecstacy and LSD are apparently less harmful than tobacco or alcohol, so anyone lighting up this morning or emptying their cans of beer from last night should perhaps consider what impact dropping "Acid" or "E" instead of bombs could have on the outcome of this war.
That is a lie. Christians have been taken to task in favor of Islam. Muslims demand and get things Christians cannot. Why? I'll tell you why. They use discrimination as a tool to further their work. CAIR screams discrimination whenever a Muslim doesn't get his way. You are one off them.
"calls for the expulsions of Muslims from the armed forces, or for a vetting process, or in a few cases for an all-out ban on Islam".
I believe all Muslims should be carefully watched. This is not the first incident involving military Muslims against other soldiers. It won't be the last. A purge sounds like a good idea to me. We can't have Muslims running around killing troops on American bases.
Your whole point is to solicite sympathy. I have none for any of you. It was you who decided to convert to a radical religion after the U.S. was attacked. So much for your loyalty. Sorry, but you are not a Marine any longer and you lost all rights to use your service as a beanie the day you went over to the enemies side. Be a Muslim, but quit whinning because you are scorned for choosing a radical religion. Islam is our enemy. It is the world's enemy.