'Gallup'ing into Muslim hearts
Arsalan Tariq Iftikhar, Midwest Communications Director, Council on American-Islamic Relations, Chicago, Illinois
According to a recent Gallup poll, residents of nine Muslim countries said they thought that the United States was aggressive and biased against Islamic values. The Gallup poll found that by a 2-to-1 margin, residents in these nations express an unfavorable opinion of the U.S., and a majority also indicated their displeasure with President George W. Bush. Most Muslims surveyed expressed the view that the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S. cannot be justified morally. Equally larger majorities labeled U.S. military action in Afghanistan "morally unjustifiable."
To fully understand the true reason for much of this resentment, we must endeavor on the unenviable and unpopular path of assessing our foreign policy initiatives in the Muslim world. We must analyze the conflicts in Palestine, Kashmir, Chechnya and Bosnia to get a real sense of how international foreign policy has severely jarred the psyche of the Muslims world. If amending the collective Muslim heart is one of President Bush's aspirations, it will not be done through a propaganda media machine in those countries. The amelioration of the 1.2 billion Muslims in the world can only occur once there are viable and just policies put in place in the affected regions.
Eleanor Roosevelt once said that, "Justice cannot be for one side alone, but must be for both." Just as the Gallup poll shows, Muslims worldwide have condemned the acts against the innocent civilians on Sept. 11. We equally condemned the indiscriminate killing of innocent Afghanis in the war on terrorism. Although the official casualty count for Afghanistan has surpassed 4,000, some groups claim that as many as 50,000 innocent lives were sacrificed in the quest to find one man. A man who still roams freely today.
Afghanistan is not even the beginning of Muslim grievances with current international policies. We wasted absolutely no time in intervening in Kuwait, calling for a "humanitarian" solution to Saddam Hussein's unjust invasion. While we protected the beloved oil fields of Kuwait City, Slobodan Milosevic sat atop the graves of more than 250,000 Muslim men, women and children in the former Yugoslavia. It took the Clinton administration almost five years to intervene in the Bosnian conflict.
William Jefferson Clinton once called the disputed territory of Kashmir "the most dangerous place on Earth." Caught in the middle of two third-word nuclear countries, Pakistan and India have fought three wars over Kashmir in their barely 50 years of existence. Amnesty International says there is one Indian soldier for every six citizens, making it the most policed state in the world.
Although Muslims cannot agree on many things, the blind complicity in the Palestinian-Israeli dispute on the part of the U.S. probably serves as the biggest slap in the face to the Muslim world. For over 50 years, the Palestinian people have been displaced out of their homes of generations and have borne future generations in refugee camps.
Some human rights group estimate there are over three million Palestinian refugees in the disputed territory. Every tank, gun and bullet of the Israeli army is funded by American taxpayers' dollars. The $4 billion that Israel receives from us is the greatest foreign aid that we distribute to any country in the world. Israel is the only country on the planet to refuse to sign the Torture Convention, a United Nations convention which bans the use of torture. Their use of "extra-judicial" killings, or assassinations, has international lawyers wanting to throw the books at them. Lawyers in Belgium have gone so far as to indict Ariel Sharon for "war crimes" for his complicity in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp massacres in 1982.
The United Nations has called Israel's actions "an affront to civilization" and former South African President Nelson Mandela has called for an end to the Palestinian "apartheid". Israel boasts their status as the only true democracy in the Middle East, but how true of a democracy can you be when you are militarily ruling three million of your residents?
To anyone who knows anything about global politics, the Gallup poll should come as no surprise. It should, however, show that there is hope in changing the opinion of the Muslim world. By adopting more effective humanitarian and viable foreign policy initiatives, the U.S. would make great strides towards ameliorating the hearts of one-fifth of humanity, which might just be enough to shift the collective equilibrium of our global psyche.