Short Memories: Northern Ireland and the Mosque

Parker wrote the song above as a bitter commentary on the Vietnam war, but it serves as an accurate commentary on society in general. I was thinking about it the other day in reference to the disgusting artificial controversy over the mosque in New York.

The only reason that the controversy exists is because some people have been convinced that Islam is in some way a religion of terrorism and all Islamics are responsible for the World Trade Center attack. The fact that a number of American Islamics died in the attack is dismissed as unimportant. After all, Christians would never commit terrorist acts, so Islam must be special, right?

We have short memories, don’t we? One advantage of being older than dirt, in my grandkids terminology, is that I have a long memory. I remember the so-called troubles in Northern Ireland, which unfortunately have popped up again fairly recently. For those of you youngsters who don’t remember, just do a search on “northern Ireland terrorism” and see what you find.

What we’ve had there, for over 100 years, is Christian on Christian, Catholics versus Protestants. Although the Catholic IRA got most of the bad press, there were militant Protestant groups that fought back. This was a war on civilians, with car bombings, assassinations, attacks on shopping centers and other public gatherings. Many innocent people of both groups died. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

So does that mean that Catholics and Protestants are terrorist groups? There are many in the UK that thought so, one of many reasons that England is very irreligious. If it’s true that they’re terrorist groups, then isn’t it a problem that there are Christian churches even closer to the Trade Center site than the proposed Islamic Cultural Center?

Perhaps there’s a different explanation. Psychologists tell us that one of the most predictable characteristics of humans is the propensity to form groups and then create conflict between them. Us versus them. This can be merely amusing, as in football team rivalry, or it can lead to more serious consequences.

In Northern Ireland the groups are Catholic and Protestant but the conflict is not religious, it’s about political power. In the Middle East you see the same thing in the conflict between the Sunni and the Shiite – both Islam, but fighting over political power. In all these conflicts some members of both groups choose to use terrorism as a political weapon and justify it with religion. But that does NOT make the religion a terrorist organization! If it does, then we would have to label Christianity as a terrorist group, too.

The United States enshrined in its Constitution the idea that the government would be neutral on religion, specifically as a result of the founding fathers experiences with a state religion (Christianity) in Europe. As a result a wide variety of religions have flourished here freely and openly, adding a rich cultural mix to our country. I think it’s pretty funny that even today ignorant people, some with really loud voices, claim that we were founded as a Christian nation, when in fact the “freedom of religion” in the Constitution was put there to protect us from becoming a Christian nation.

The tendency to blame all of Islam for the actions of a political terrorist group is historically and intellectually repulsive. People from all religions and no religion have become terrorists. If we blame all of Islam for the World Trade Center we will be playing into the terrorist’s hands and slandering a whole group of mostly nice people who were just as horrified as anyone else in the US by those events.

As a side note, the most widely read poet in America is the 13th century Muslim scholar Rumi. Let’s not have short memories, eh?

Tagged as: Christianity, fundamentalism, Islam, politics, power