Do Muslims really hate the West? A little sensitivity would help

Rob Asghar, Contributor, Los Angeles, rasghar@earthlink.net

Thousands of Pakistanis chanted "Down with America" recently in the wild, woolly and somewhat insane frontier town of Peshawar. Is this further evidence that Muslims "hate" the United States and the West? The answer is mixed.

First, one should point out that, on the teeming streets of major Pakistani cities, the presence of a few thousand angry people is less of a political statement than a coincidence. In the capital city of Islamabad, only a few hundred protesters bothered to report for duty.

Second, several million Muslims of foreign descent live in the United States, England and other Western nations, call them home, and have no intention of going back. They often come for an education and a head start in a career, and find themselves being "infected by the Western bug," coming to appreciate the West's unique blend of freedom, stability, openness, tolerance and opportunity.

The American brand of Islam is vastly different from that seen in a Peshawar neighborhood. Many of these American Muslims proselytize, not to send converts to Afghan training camps, but simply to help others live lives of moral order.

Third, many of these Muslims would want nothing more than to bring many of their kin here to join in the fun. They loathe Osama bin Laden for making the task so difficult due to stiffened Western immigration rules.

Yet many Muslims around the world do feel antipathy toward aspects of the West. It ranges from exasperation with Western entertainment to fear of Western morals to knee-jerk voting against Republicans to the full fury of a small cut of the Muslim population. The U.S. government and media have so far failed to understand this spectrum of negativity.

Muslims are indeed jealous of American love for Israel and are flummoxed and polarized by it. Many puzzle over how Israel's friends and supporters can lobby so effectively for aid, loans, and non-interference with settlement policies that the U.S. opposes. They hear that "Israel is an American friend," and they wonder why oil-rich Muslim nations couldn't be seen as more attractive friends.

They hear that "Israel is a democracy," and wonder why that has so little to do with American geopolitical strategy in other parts of the world. They hear that "Israel shares our Judeo- Christian values," and they wonder why the U.S. media opts not to show the destruction of Palestinian homes that preoccupies the Al-Jazeera network.

And they of course view matters still more cynically when North Korea flashes a far more advanced nuclear capability than Iraq, yet is demonized far less by the American right wing.

The irony is that American Muslims and American political conservatives are natural allies, especially in the area of personal and social morality. But such an alliance won't happen for many moons, because conservatives have been the most enthusiastic in criticizing Islam and maximizing the perceived threat of the Islamic world.

Want to irritate many American Muslims who are deeply devoted both to their faith and to their adopted American homeland? Switch channels even briefly to the rabidly conservative Fox News, and listen to their outcry. Fewer howls of protest would meet an airing of the Playboy Channel than the sight of a Rumsfeldite hawk spinning scenarios to humiliate an already emasculated Arab population.

For its part, the Bush administration can do a few things to narrow the breach between the world's Muslims and the United States government. Bush must rely less on the Rumsfeld and Cheney wing's strident articulation of geopolitical priorities.

His administration must try to do a far better job of articulating a moral and strategic basis for supporting Israel in terms that fair-minded Muslims (yes, they do exist) can respect.

And the American administration must be far more sensitive to the seeming contradictions in their policies and the repercussions within Muslim communities. Doing so won't solve all the world's political problems, but would at least constitute a step toward controlling them.

The writer is a second-generation Pakistani American and Presbyterian elder. He contributed this comment to The Jakarta Post.