The Great Turtle Island vs….Islam?

If Richard Clarke is correct, that overcoming Middle East terrorism is all about understanding and eventually helping to ease the ideological battle within Islam, we are lost.

“It is a war that we are losing,” Clarke, author of the book Against All Enemies, wrote in Monday's New York Times, “as more and more of the Islamic world develops antipathy toward the United States and some even develop a respect for the jihadist movement.

“I do not pretend to know the formula for winning that ideological war,” Clarke goes on. “But I do know that we cannot win it without significant help from our Muslim friends, and that many of our recent actions (chiefly the invasion of Iraq) have made it far more difficult to obtain that cooperation and to achieve credibility.”

The reason is obvious: Americans don't know or care about cultures, much less religions, other than our own. America as a Judeo-Christian nation is advanced, modern-thinking and progressive, and everyone else is a sand-eating camel jockey, spear-throwing cannibal, rice-growing slant-eye and you can add your own hateful epithet. Even Europeans aren't immune. And we haven't even begun to talk about other religions.

For all the talk about “Judeo-Christian,” Judaism is marginalized, as witness to the Supreme Court's ruling several years back that a Christmas tree is not a religious symbol, kids' sports leagues thinking nothing about scheduling events on Jewish holidays, much less Friday nights and Saturday mornings, and other examples.

Islam? Despite the rush to understanding following 9/11, almost half of Americans still equate Islam with violence. A poll taken last September by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that 44 percent of Americans say that Islam is more likely to encourage violence than other religions. (Obviously, Americans know little or nothing about the Crusades, Western Christian Europe's war on the Muslim “infidels,” which may have given rise to anti-Westernism more than a thousand years ago.)

What's most chilling about the poll is that instead of listening to what Clarke is saying – that the key to overcoming Middle East terrorism is through understanding of Islam's divides and how to appeal to Muslims who don't believe in the jihadists – we are retreating farther into our shells like turtles. Fewer of us believe we know “some” or “a great deal” about Islam than before the attacks, and fewer people say Islam and their own religion have a lot in common.

Clarke ends his essay with a call to common sense: “We all want to defeat the jihadists. To do that, we need to encourage an active, critical and analytical debate in America about how that will best be done.” But the only thing we're seeing is intolerance. A sampling of popular best-selling titles about Islam on Amazon.com includes: Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia  by Ahmed Rashid; Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent; and Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West by Robert Spencer. Confidence is not high.

Contact Ira Lacher here.