They are the people whose speech and writing should get the most attention.
My understanding of the past is that world domination has been the goal of many cultures, and that Western Europe and then North America happened to win for a while. One of the themes of a culture dominating another culture frequently seems to be the deliberate destruction of the oppressed culture's intellectual life.
Western Europe did that to Islam. Contemporary discrimination against Muslims fails to recognize the history of Europe's suppression of Islamic intellectual achievements, and portrays them as subhumans whose religion intractably propels them toward violence.
It doesn't seem to me that Muslims have been able to assimilate into American culture; not the way that Jews have. That could be because the Holocaust was such tangible proof of the ultimately destructive effects of anti-Jewish anti-Semitism, and was directly witnessed as such by so many American soldiers, that virulent, anti-Jewish anti-Semitism ceased to be something that was casually accepted as a norm by non-Jewish Americans to the extent that it was accepted before World War II.
Perhaps humanity's problem is that we have never dismantled the us-them mentality that causes war and other atrocities. I have never, in my entire life, known a time when the Middle East was not a diplomat's nightmare. It also can't be denied that the United States has committed atrocities against Muslims.
Raised Jewish before every other religion, I am not capable of wishing that Israel be disintegrated as a geographic and political entity. Raised American, I am not capable of wishing that the United States be a place where church and state are intertwined.
I think that one thing that the United States has to do is to stop characterizing Islam as having no real intellectual tradition. It's a dehumanizing lie that causes derision and violence against Muslims and that provokes fear and/or sadness and/or anger from them, as it would do to and from anyone.
I think it would also be helpful if humanity's goals matured; world domination is a bad goal.
Copyright L. Kochman, November 12, 2016 @ 9:52 p.m.
