Dehumanizing Muslims

Filed under: Europe, Religion — Michael van der Galien, Editor-in-Chief on April 23, 2008 @ 1:36 pm CEST

‘This exposes that the differentiation between Islam and the West is not about values. It is all about dehumanization of the other. Values such as democracy, freedom and tolerance are mere tools in an old game of forming inferior-superior identities,’ Nejdan Yildiz writes for Turkish Daily News.

Last month, I attended an annual assembly of the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. The assembly is a student conference that proceeds with round-table discussions among cadets and visiting students and speeches given by field experts. This years’ subject was “Dismantling Terrorism.” I was selected for the assembly due to my focus in the area of conflict and security. As a part of an international delegation, composed of 18 graduate students from countries ranging from Israel, Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq and more, I expected to gain valuable knowledge and experience from the conference. However, that experience turned out to be of a very unexpected variety.

Born-again anti-Islam:

The most shocking event had been the invitation of three evangelical preachers to speak to us. It was my first engagement with evangelicals, and I was terrified by their arguments. First of all, these speakers are Arabs from the Middle East and they claimed to be former militia members fighting against Israel. They had killed numerous people (one of them claimed to reach 223 deaths) and then they all had different versions of “spiritual journeys” after which they decided to become Christians. The main argument of these preachers was to present Islam as an ideology, a political movement rather than a religion, which is fundamentally antagonistic to Western and American values (the West and America were often used interchangeably). Once Islam was presented as an ideology, it became possible to make comparisons between Islamism, Nazism and Communism. Moreover, one of the preachers claimed that the problem was not Arabs, but the ideology that shaped their minds. Hence, the evangelicals subtly (and not so subtly) claimed that the solution to terrorism was the conversion of Muslims to Christianity and the prohibition of everything related to Islam…

Hate speeches, such as these of the three evangelicals, will always exist. Publicizing their work benefits the authors. However, since the audience had been the cadets of the U.S. Air Force, that event deserves attention. I was shocked by the speeches not because of what was said, but because of where it was said. I cannot imagine an extremist Imam giving anti-Western, anti-American hate speeches in an institution of the Turkish Armed Forces. Many of the cadets that I have met at the U.S. Academy have been highly open-minded and who have been open to learning from the experiences of international students.

This is indeed quite a big problem; these people shouldn’t be taken seriously, at least not in such a setting.

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1 C Stanley

April 23, 2008 @ 2:21 pm CEST

A couple of odd things about this article; one, the author never even names who the speakers were, and two, he doesn’t give a single quote from them, just describes his own interpretation of what they said. It’s a bit hard to know whether or not his inferrences are accurate, without even an excerpt from a transcript. And then even if I take him at his word, I don’t quite understand the outrage over people describing the terrorist acts as those of ideologues; I would think it would be a good thing to separate the ideology of militant Islamism from the religion of Islam itself. Now, whether or not those speakers are also proselytizing and claiming that the cure for terrorism is to convert the Middle East to Christianity, I have no idea (again, without a transcript, it’s impossible to know what was actually said.)

It wasn’t hard to find the names and learn more about the controversy over these speakers though; I googled and found this:
http://www.airforcetimes.com/news/2008/02/airforce_terrorists_academy_022908/

Apparently the Air Force responded to some complaints by lining up some additional speakers to give a different perspective; and then there was also controversy over THAT, because one of the additional speakers is an attorney who frequently sues the military for espousing Christian viewpoints and he spoke after those Arab evangelicals of the need to ‘deprogram’ the cadets:
http://www.christianfighterpilot.com/blog/?p=170

2 PatHMV

April 23, 2008 @ 3:25 pm CEST

Unfortunately, Christine, my initial reaction is to give the report some credence. There have been serious problems in the recent past with vastly inappropriate proselytization by evangelicals at the Air Force Academy. See my post at Centerfield in 2005, and a post by MW Schneider in 2006. As Tully notes in comments to the MWS post, this has come about largely because of an influx of evangelical churches to the Colorado Springs area (mostly during the years of the Clinton Administration), not because of pressure from top Air Force brass.

Based on your additional links, I suspect the problem is that they still haven’t quite gotten everybody on base on-board with the "leave your religion at home" message, and so they still get into problems, but there’s enough sensitivity to the issue at the top level that they do try to fix the problems that arise.

3 C Stanley

April 23, 2008 @ 3:47 pm CEST

Oh, I’m not disputing that, Pat- I was only pointing out the journalistic weakness in the original article that Michael linked to. The additional materials support the idea that the general concern is warranted- just perhaps not to the degree that the original author expressed it (IOW, the initial article was one sided, but learning the other side doesn’t completely mitigate the problems described.)

4 JudasPriest

April 23, 2008 @ 4:31 pm CEST

The bottom-line is the substance of the article which is the deliberate stereotyping of terrorists with all Muslims. Is there not similar examples from Islamic world, absolutely yes. Though, in a joint conference, insulting guest group like this is very very rare. I personally do not appreciate anyone taking the defensive position in debates like this by undermining the essence of the story, which if you do it definitely lowers the honesty and credibility of your rational approach to the subject. It is best for everyone if we could skin-off our religious identities and see "others" without hatred and stereotyping. Lucky me that I have nothing to skin off.

5 Tully

April 23, 2008 @ 5:13 pm CEST

In a rhetorical war, it’s a lot easier to defend yourself when you don’t keep handing the other side ammunition. The AFA is not really doing itself any favors with its speaker lists. For either conference.

6 Nihat

April 23, 2008 @ 8:52 pm CEST

Bitter lemons make your stomach sick. What’s so hard to understand in that? An ex-muslim-terrorist-Arab-turned-evangelical-Christian can lead you to one place only: the toilet! Also, the author of the TDN article is not necessarily a journalist.