Muslims and the U.S. position

The Dawn, Asia News Network, Karachi

President Pervez Musharraf's statement that the American attack on Iraq has done "lasting damage" to U.S.-Muslim relations deserves to be noted by policymakers in Washington. In an interview with a British newspaper, the president said that the fact that all the world's trouble spots involved Muslims made them feel that it was their religion that was under attack.

Undeniably, in all the problems that are now the focus of world attention -- Kashmir, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and Chechnya, and until recently Bosnia and Kosovo -- Muslims are not only "involved", they are invariably at the receiving end. More regrettably, it is Muslim blood that is being spilled in these flashpoints of conflict.

The number of Muslim dead runs into hundreds of thousands. In Bosnia alone, a minimum of 200,000 Muslims were massacred and millions made homeless. In Kashmir, since the uprising began in 1989, the casualty figure has risen to 70,000 dead. In Palestine, Israeli settlers have been massacring Muslims since they began arriving in the holy land after the Balfour Declaration was passed in 1917.

While the exact number of Muslims killed by Zionist militias and later by Israel is difficult to tabulate, the Palestinians have borne the brunt of burning of villages, mass expulsions from their ancestral homes, and innumerable massacres. Memories of Deir Yassin, Sabra-Chatilla and Qana will never fade from Arab and Muslim minds.

In all these places, it is Muslims who have been and are still being persecuted, not the other way round. Invariably, it is their freedom that has been denied, and it is their lands that are under foreign occupation. Consequently, it is Muslims who are fighting for just causes and not those on the wrong side. Yet the tragedy is that it is those fighting for their freedom who are labeled "terrorists", while their oppressors are being presented as the wronged ones.

Even before Sept. 11, the U.S. had been utterly indifferent to the denial of freedom and violations of human rights if the victims were Muslims. After Sept. 11, the American establishment has adopted a posture heavily tilted against the Muslim world, not against specific terrorist groups.

The western media, regrettably, has not helped matters either. In fact, the American media seems to be working overtime to portray all Muslims as potential terrorists and their religion as an aggressive creed. However, no other issue has aroused so much resentment among the Muslims as the American attitude towards the question of Palestine.

In fact, by giving unqualified political and diplomatic support to Israel, and by doling out plentiful doses of economic and military aid to Tel Aviv, America has encouraged Israel in its violations of the relevant UN resolutions on Palestine and abetted in Israel's policy of state terrorism against the Palestinian people.

As for Iraq, liberal opinion even in the U.S. and Europe has been outraged by the Bush administration's concoction of the myth of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and the doctoring of intelligence to justify the attack.

The merciless bombing of Baghdad and the plunder of its cultural heritage have shocked the Muslim world. People in the Arab-Islamic world and many even in Europe and North America believe Iraq has been attacked and occupied basically to advance Israel's agenda in the Middle East.

The attack on the World Trade Center was an abominable crime. It hurt Muslim interests as nothing else has in the post-cold war period. But America's policies and actions in the post-Sept. 11 period have taken on the form of a crusade against the entire Muslim world.

This is astonishing, because almost all Muslim countries condemned the attack on the WTC, have cooperated with the U.S. in the war on terror, and helped in the defeat of the Taliban regime.

Yet the treatment meted out to illegal Muslim immigrants in America (even though Hispanic and other groups outnumber illegal Muslim immigrants), the racial profiling of Muslims at immigration points, and their humiliation -- all have served to cast America in a bad light in the Muslim world.

What U.S. policymakers should note is that the policies being crafted by America's pro-Zionist neocons will only add to its problems, perpetuate the current anti-U.S. wave, and produce more fanatics and terrorists.

What can really soften Muslim attitudes toward America is a change in Washington's policies as indicated by President Musharraf. In specific terms, the U.S. should pursue a more pro- freedom and pro-justice policy in areas where Muslims are victims of tyranny and repression, and help in a resolution of such long- standing issues as Kashmir and Palestine.

Washington's indifference to continuation of genocide and the perpetuation of tyranny in these areas simply because the victims happen to be Muslims is one of the biggest sources of hostility toward the U.S. in the Arab-Islamic world and makes Muslims view America as a party to a war on their religion.