I subscribe to a financial newsletter that is edited by a man who is theologically educated and historically knowledgeable who each week posts a Q&A where he answers subscribers questions. Most questions are financial in nature but frequently the questions stray (sorta like this message board) from the purely financial topics to those of general interest. The response to one of the questions this week I found very illuminating and thus am posting the question and his reply for your entertainment (with his permission so as to avoid copyright infringement). http://www.dessauerinvestorsworld.com/index.php Edited by Gary L. Alexander, Executive Editor, John Dessauer’s Investor’s World ® Question #19: This is more of a comment than a question. Your article on Iraq in your April issue is missing a major point. I am a Canadian engineer who has been working in Malaysia for about a year. I realize the issue is difficult and that Saddam’s regime is brutal, but I wish you could hear the questions I get from educated, middle class, tolerant Malaysians (both Muslim and Indian). Questions like: “Why do the Americans hate Muslims? Why don’t the Americans use their military power to stop the conflict between Israel and Palestine? Why do the Americans attack the Muslims in Iraq but not the North Koreans who are openly threatening them with nuclear weapons?” We in the West are creating a lot of enemies with this war. And the arguments widely reported in the press between the Western powers about who will control (and profit) from the reconstruction of Iraq serve only to convince the Muslims that this war is about extending American economic influence, not about preserving American security. I believe your government's intentions are good but they are alienating a large part of the world. The consequences for world peace are very troubling. Regards, John S. (April 5) You called this a comment, but then you asked a lot of questions, so I will try to answer your series of commonly asked questions here. You say that your Malaysian Muslim friends wonder why we attack those of their faith? I would counter by asking if they are aware that Americans have come to the aid and rescue of several Muslim minorities in the last decade. We rescued the Muslim minority in Kosovo from the bullies in Bosnia. We forced a regime change and ended the genocide of helpless Muslims there. In the Balkans, we attacked white Christians who killed helpless Muslims, and — this is important — those false “Christian” persecutors under Slobodon Milosevic were killing Muslims in the name of white Christianity. Let me repeat that: They were killing Muslims in the name of the white race and the Christian faith, and we stopped them cold, from 5,000 miles away. For all the bad things the U.S. government has done, we never committed any crimes like the French did in Algeria (mass torture). Chirac not only fought in Algeria, but he was injured there, while fighting Muslims. We also rescued the Muslims in Kuwait from the brutal 1990 occupation by Saddam Hussein. Last year, we rescued the Muslims of Afghanistan from the brutal Taliban regime. We also tried to bring food to the Muslims in Somalia in 1993, where 17 of our troops were murdered when a Black Hawk helicopter went down, and fellow soldiers tried to rescue them, as in the book and movie. In Iraq right now, we are not fighting a war against Muslims, but for the liberation of a variety of persecuted groups of Muslims under Saddam Hussein. He, like Hitler and Stalin, is not religious. He is an atheist thug. We are trying to liberate Iraq from a power-mad brute who has killed 500,000 Kurds and Muslims. (Iraq is not a Muslim country, or a theocracy — like Afghanistan was under the Taliban. It has a very large Christian community — in fact, one of the oldest in the world. It also has a sizeable Jewish community. Until maybe 50 years ago, it was one of the largest in the world.) To your Malaysian friends, I would also add that it was the their Prime Minister who publicly blamed the Jews for his country’s financial mess. That would be unthinkable for an American president to do. Regarding Korea, you might remind your Malaysian friends that we already lost 43,000 American lives in Korea, fighting against North Korea, and we have stationed tens of thousands of troops there in the last 50 years, in order to prevent a new war. We have also been trying to broker peace in the Middle East for 35 years, but radical Muslims keep assassinating the moderate Muslims who agree to peace (like Anwar Sadat). If anything, our long attempt to be tolerant of Islamic fanatics got us into trouble. Prior to September 11, we had an open door policy for anyone from anywhere. Perhaps you assume, as does your Malaysian friend, that the Islamic world is a monolith. It is not. There are hundreds of millions of Muslims who want to embrace the future, but they are being held hostage by the radical minority among them. It would be good if this peaceful majority realized that, instead of assuming (as your friends do) that America is at fault for the violence of radical Islam. If, after looking at recent history in this light, Muslims still ask you why America is warring against them, I would respond: “You have it all backwards, my friend.” I will ask: “Why are so many in your creed picking fights with America? For over 30 years, Muslim terrorists have been exploding bombs, hijacking airlines, killing innocent tourists and blowing up any semblance of American culture they can find. Have any American mobs gone around blowing up mosques, killing Muslims at random?” I’d say we have been very slow to anger. Whether we are good religious Christians or not, we have practiced Christianity by turning the other cheek, 70 times 7. We have taken this abuse for 30 years without responding much. We can’t keep allowing terrorist attacks to escalate without response. Nobody likes to talk about “Holy War.” It sounds self-contradictory — the ultimate oxymoron — but if people raise the question, I’ll go back further in history. Muslims and Christians have been at war for nearly 1400 years. The war has gone in five cycles, but it began with Muslims invading and wiping out Christian communities in the Middle East and North Africa. I’ll try to be brief, but it’s a long war: Phase One (622 to 732 AD): Unlike Christianity, which suffered for its first three centuries as a small persecuted, private religion, Islam broke upon the world scene with an explosion of violence. Islam began in the seventh century AD, when the Prophet raided trading centers in the Saudi peninsula, to consolidate his power. At the time, Egypt, Libya and all of North Africa were Christian. So were Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and Asia Minor (Turkey). Think of Augustine, bishop of Hippo (in North Africa). Alexandria and Constantinople had been Christian for centuries. Antioch (now in Syria) and Ephesus (Turkey) were major Christian centers then. St. John Chrysostom was from Antioch; St. Athanasius, primary author of the Nicene Creed, was from Alexandria. Armenia was also Christian. Islam didn’t send missionaries into these lands to convince Christians of the new religion. No, they murdered them. They slaughtered the Christians and taxed non-Muslims into submission. They drove into the heart of France and were only turned back at Tours in 732. They pushed up from the Rock of Gibralter to the banks of the Loire. We came that close to being practicing Muslims today. Phase Two (1000 to 1200 AD): Then came the Crusades, a feeble Christian counter-attack, targeting only a small postage stamp of land, in and around Jerusalem. The Crusades failed to gain any kind of permanent stronghold. Crusades appeared to be more of a political sop to ruling European monarchs than any noble quest to capture the Holy Land. The most successful Crusade was the first, and it only established a few tottering Latin domains in Palestine. They were far from home, lacked a supply line and quickly failed. In modern parlance, “Crusaders and Zionists” are shouldering nearly all the blame for modern terrorism, but these soldiers only sought to occupy a small postage stamp of land in the East Mediterranean. In historical context, these Crusading Christians were only trying to recapture 1% of the land that was taken from them by the Mohammedan raiders between 622 and 732 AD. Phase Three (1454 to 1683): The forces of Mohammed counter-attacked, building an Ottoman Empire that spread, at its peak, from Morocco to Persia (Iran), and from Yugoslavia to the tip of Arabia. Their expansion reached into Europe again on May 29, 1453, when Constantinople fell. They killed every Christian they saw in the streets. Europe fled back to its fortress again, fighting against any further incursions, with mixed luck. The Ottomon advance finally came to an end in Vienna, where the city survived, almost by miraculous fiat, on September 11, 1683. (That date should ring a bell. It is the date of two major Islamic defeats, in Vienna in 1683, and a defeat of the Wahhabi sect in Saudi Arabia, by the invading Egyptians, on September 11, 1818. Osama bin Laden is also a student of history. He sent a signal to all Holy Warriors by attacking America on that day.) Phase Four (1798 to 1973): Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798, and that led directly to the wars between the Wahhabi sect of Saudi Arabia and Muhammed Ali in Egypt, resulting in the September 11, 1818 defeat. Then came the advance of Zionism in the last century, co-incident with the British control of the division of Middle Eastern lands (such as Iraq), under Lawrence of Arabia and others. This was seen as the second Christian/Jewish Crusade against “their” holy lands. Little Israel provides dissidents with a convenient whipping boy, but it is a small land and Palestinians have turned down several peaceful options for dividing that land. Israel is a side show in the Holy War, but in the Six Day War of June 1967, and Yom Kippur War of 1973, Israel took possession of more land, and that launched Phase 5. Phase Five (1972 to the present): The Islamic counter-attack began at the 1972 Munich Olympics, with the murder of Israeli athletes and the shoot-out at the airport, killing the terrorists, too. Then came the OPEC oil embargo after the Yom Kippur War, and terrorist attacks almost every year since then. I can’t possibly list all the atrocities of the last 30 years, but just to give you a refresher course: Here in Washington DC, on March 9-11, 1977, Hanafi Muslims held 139 Americans hostage for 39 hours.… In 1979, Iran took 54 Americans hostage for 444 days, and we never retaliated…. In 1983, terrorists bombed the U.S. embassy in Beirut, killing 63, and six months later they bombed the U.S. Marine barracks, killing 241. They also kept taking professors at American University as hostages. Here’s what Moslem terrorists did in just one 12-month span of 1985-86: June 14, 1985 — a Shi’ite Muslim group hijacked a TWA jet in Athens, taking Americans hostage. October 7-10, 1985 — The Achille Lauro ship was hijacked, killing wheelchair-bound Leon Klinghoffer. December 27, 1985 — Bombs went off in Rome & Vienna airports, killing 18 and wounding 110. April 2, 1986 — A TWA jet was bombed by Arab terrorists, killing 14. April 5, 1986 — A bomb was set off in a Berlin discotheque, killing one U.S. serviceman, wounding 155. In all this, Ronald Reagan did not retaliate any more than setting up some trade sanctions against Libya. Reagan and Bush (Sr.) tried to be the nice guys, as did Bill Clinton, who continued America’s non-partisan policy of taking the blows and not retaliating. In the first full month of the Clinton presidency, in February 1993, a Muslim terrorist cell in New Jersey bombed the World Trade Center, killing six. They hoped to topple both Towers. In 1996, Muslim terrorists attacked the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 Americans. Then came the 1998 bombing deaths of hundreds of Africans and Americans at the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. In 1999, dozens of Western tourists in Egypt were killed, and an Egyptian off-duty pilot killed over 200 in the mid-Atlantic. In 2000, suicide bombers hit the U.S.S. Cole, and then came four jets flying into the World Trade Center and Washington DC on September 11, 2001. Each time, the perpetrator was a Middle Eastern Muslim. Each time, we were told, “This is not the real Islam. The radicals have hijacked the religion.” (If so, mainstream Muslims need to police some of their own.) I don’t buy anyone’s condemnation that we “hate Muslims.” It seems to be the other way around. According to the late Ayatollah Khomeini, and now Osama bin Laden and other terrorists, America is the “Great Satan” and Israel is only “the little Satan.” If Israel ceased to exist, America would still be a target of terrorism. The initial motivation for bin Laden’s reign of terror was the presence of Americans on his “holy soil” (holy sand?) in Saudi Arabia in 1990, to prepare for Operation Desert Shield. The presence of female soldiers was especially galling to him, and to his Wahhabi cohorts. (Fifteen of the 19 airline terrorists on September 11 were Saudi natives.) Can we create peace by surrendering again? Theoretically, America could come back home and not have any outposts around the world, and not try to stop any future genocides or weapons stockpiling, and we could earn some theoretical “peace” from Muslim terrorists, but don’t count on it. From the beginning, Mohammed founded a “church/state empire” as a conquering political force. As Islam spreads into more national political movements, Islam could become a ruling global ideology within 50 years. That is a long-term threat we need to take seriously, but it is not inevitable. I would counter that the current form of terrorist Islam is another form of mass hysteria. We have seen it in every generation. Most recently (in the 20th Century), the Japanese thought their Emperor was god, and they were invincible. They, like today’s suicide bombers, flew into our war ships and were prepared to die (to the last child) in defense of their home islands. The atomic bomb popped the bubble of hysteria. Now, Japan is peaceful. Germany came under the hypnotic spell of Hitler, but a week after Hitler died there were no Nazi’s left in Germany. After Mao died, China became capitalistic. The same thing happened in Eastern Europe after the end of the Cold War. Winning a war is a quick cure for national hysteria. Until next week, keep asking, keep searching. Don’t settle for easy answers. Seeking truth is hard work. I’ll see you next Tuesday. — Gary Alexander, for John Dessauer