Western thinkers must begin to recognize the difference between Islamism and Islam, or we are headed toward an ideologically defined battle with one quarter of humanity.

That’s the entire point of Newsweek’s Is It Islamic or Islamist?

I’ll add “jihad” and “Jihadism” to the mix. The political or social philosophies of Islamism and Jihadism (note my use of -ism and capitalization) are different from the religion of Islam and the concept of jihad. It’s comparable to equating Judaism and Zionism, with the added disadvantage that we are essentially using the same word for two different concepts.

So stop it.

“No matter how smart I was, I wasn’t getting the respect I wanted. They still hit on me, made crude remarks and even smacked me on the butt a couple times. [With the niqab,] they have to deal with my brain because I don’t give them any other choice.”

That’s American-born Muslim woman Hebah Ahmed describing her previous life as one of few woman in an overwhelmingly male industry. She was often the only woman on an otherwise all-male oil rig, or in the lab. As such, she frequently experienced the sexism and hostility described above.

Hebah Ahmed (that’s not her in the photo above), her sister Sarah, and five other niqab-wearing women were interviewed by the New York Times for its article Behind the Veil (log in required).

Ahmed chose to wear the niqab as a spiritual choice. Yet it had the effect of making her male coworkers act like they have some damn sense. Sad that those men couldn’t grant her the respect due a colleague any other way.

I suspect this is partly why many Muslim women still choose to wear the niqab in places where they can choose not to: it deflects the male gaze.

Citing religious discrimination, a diverse coalition of Jewish organizations is objecting to Switzerland’s ban of minarets on local mosques.

Swiss voters this week approved by a strong majority a referendum outlawing the construction of minarets. The measure, pushed by the right-wing Swiss People’s Party (SVP), was supported by 57 percent of the population.

However, Jewish organizations, realizing that a crackdown on Islam could have repercussions for Jews as well, have come to the defense of Muslim worshipers, arguing that the Swiss’s move was unjustifiable.

This story made me think of the famous poem First they came…. Stand up for others now so they will stand with you later.

From The Bizarre Logic Behind the Swiss Minaret Ban by Yassin Musharbash:

One should certainly avoid sugar-coating the sometimes unpleasant situation faced by Christians living in the Muslim world. There is room for criticism. But one should choose the appropriate means. To paint the Swiss referendum against building minarets as an act of solidarity with Christians living in the Middle East, as some are now doing, is just plain bizarre.

Some of those who support the result of the Swiss referendum can be heard to say things like: As long as Saudi Arabia won’t allow any churches to be built there, we’re entitled to tell Muslims that they can’t build minarets here. It is a specious argument.

I think Swiss right-wing rhetoric also tilts this Clash of Civilizations towards a holy war. No good can come of such a thing.

In a very rare moment of candor for this rank war-loving propagandist, he announced very clearly the real purpose of the war, only for him to now turn around and accuse Muslims of being blind and hateful because they heard his message loud and clear, and because they don’t express enough gratitude for all the gracious Freedom Bombs we’ve dropped — and continue to drop — on their homes, their villages, their families, their children and their society.

Friedman’s column America vs. The Narrative left me with a sense of incredulity. In it, he writes:

Yes, after two decades in which U.S. foreign policy has been largely dedicated to rescuing Muslims or trying to help free them from tyranny — in Bosnia, Darfur, Kuwait, Somalia, Lebanon, Kurdistan, post-earthquake Pakistan, post-tsunami Indonesia, Iraq and Afghanistan — a narrative that says America is dedicated to keeping Muslims down is thriving.

This is a gross simplification when it’s not an outright lie. Let’s review.

Clinton’s stated rationale for NATO action in Bosnia was to keep southern Europe from exploding into a regional war, not “rescuing Muslims.”

Sure we rescued Muslims in Kuwait. But the United States and Europe got much of its oil from Kuwait at the time. An Iraqi-controlled Kuwait would have been disastrous for the global oil supply, and put too much oil in Saddam Hussein’s hands.

Darfur? Really? Our government has done little more than send supplies to Darfur. Our efforts have been fairly half-assed.

Lebanon? Well the United States vetoed UN Security Council motions that censured Israel for its 1982 invasion of Lebanon (which was an effort to stamp out the Palestinian Liberation Organization). At the time, Lebanon’s 40% Christian minority held the bulk of the country’s power. Yes, our involvement in Lebanon was totally about “rescuing Muslims.”

We also did not invade Afghanistan to “rescue Muslims” from the Taliban. We toppled the Taliban because they had <sarcasm>total control</sarcasm> of an impoverished, rural, mountainous, hard-to-navigate country with almost no infrastructure and were sheltering al-Qaeda.

According to the Bush administration, we invaded Iraq because of an imminent, existential threat to the United States posed by Weapons of Mass Destruction. Again, it was not about “rescuing Muslims.”

And while Somalia was arguably a humanitarian intervention, the conflict itself had roots in U.S. and Soviet Union Cold War power grabs.

Yet even with a well-documented, easily-Googled history of reasons that have nothing to do with our big ol’ American hearts, Friedman insists that not only did we do awesome things, but that we did these things for Muslims’ own good. I will call Friedman’s assertion the Benevolent Bomb Dropper Narrative.

Don’t misunderstand, I agree with Friedman that there is no ‘American-Crusader-Zionist conspiracy’ to keep Muslims down. U.S. foreign policy is pro-control-of-money-land-and-resources, not anti-Muslim. But there is a degree of truth contained within it.

The Narrative is not merely a “cocktail of half-truths, propaganda and outright lies” that were “concocted” by jihadists to obscure “our million acts of kindness.” It’s a very real, understandable, and arguably justifiable response to about a century’s worth of European and American colonialism, capitalism, and military occupation. I’ll point you to “Think Again: God” by Karen Armstrong in the November/December 2009 issue of Foreign Policy and this quote:

Even the actions of so-called jihadists have been inspired by politics, not God. In a study of suicide attacks between 1980 and 2004, American scholar Robert Pape concluded that 95 percent were motivated by a clear strategic objective: to force modern democracies to withdraw from territory the assailants regard as their national homeland.

In other words, The Narrative isn’t as crazy as Mr. Friedman thinks it is, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan not withstanding.

I will close with this quote from Stephen M. Walt‘s blog post Why They Hate Us (I): Lessons from Civil War Reconstruction:

Military occupation generates resistance because it is humiliating, disruptive, arbitrary and sometimes terrifying to its objects, even when the occupying power is acting from more-or-less benevolent motives. If you’ve ever been caught in a speed trap by a rude or abusive policeman (I have), or selected out for special attention crossing a border (ditto), you have a mild sense of what this is like. You are at the mercy of the person in charge, who is inevitably well-armed and can do pretty much whatever he (or she) wants. Any sign of protest will only make things go badly — and in some situations will get you arrested, beaten, or worse — so you choke down your anger and just put up with it. Now imagine that this is occurring after you’ve waited for hours at some internal checkpoint, that none of the occupiers speak your language, and that it is like this every single day. And occasionally the occupying power kills innocent people by mistake, engages in other forms of indiscriminate force, and does so with scant regard for local customs and sensibilities. Maintain this situation long enough, and some members of the local population will start looking for ways to strike back. Some of them may even decide to strap on explosive vests or get behind the wheel of a explosives-laden truck, and sacrifice themselves.

Is it really that hard of a concept to grasp?

Also see:

• The al-Qaeda-Taliban Nexus from the Council on Foreign Relations
• The Tajik Solution: A Model for Fixing Afghanistan from Foreign Affaris

But the knee jerk reaction of blaming Islam and Muslims, in general, or looking for delusional links to “al Qaeda,” for the horrific murders at Fort Hood points to something far more fundamental, overdue, and urgent — namely something of a psychological barrier for Americans to accept the Islamic component of their own society, culture, and history.

Muslim American Hamid Dabashi in his CNN opinion piece, U.S. Muslims are Americans too. Case and point: Malcolm X and the American Civil Rights Movement.

I think Malcolm X — (justifiably) angry, fiery, don’t-start-none-won’t-be-none-but-if-you-want-it-we-got-it Malcolm X — is a big part of why most (non-urban, non-Black) Americans fear Islam. Americans are particularly good at poking people in the eye and getting upset and afraid when they threaten to poke back. And Malcolm said, without apology, and with good reason: We will poke back.

The Army’s pig-headed failure to accommodate Maj. Hasan was, for a time, the most important — and most damaging — detail for understanding his shooting rampage. Because if Maj. Hasan tried to get out of his deployment, and if he telegraphed every warning signal possible (emailing terrorists, cruising 7-11s in his Al Qaeda costume) to bolster his case to reverse his deployment orders, and all the while the Army bureaucracy ignored him despite his 20 years’ service — then that means the massacre can’t be blamed just on one crazy Islamofascist’s inner evil.

The “Secret Jihadist” narrative surrounding Maj. Nidal Hasan and the Ft. Hood shootings is disturbing enough. But what if it was really Hasan’s scheme to get the Army to take him and his requests for a release or an exemption seriously? Consider:

We’d also have to examine the link between Hasan’s rampage and the Army’s record number of suicides this year — which so far nearly equals the total number of US combat deaths in Iraq. A lot of this year’s suicides involve Army personnel which hadn’t yet shipped out to the war zones, like Maj. Hasan — a grim statistic that belies the chickenhawks’ screeching attacks denying the existence of pre-combat stress syndrome.

Yes. As of November 2009, there were 140 confirmed suicides among the active-duty Army alone. Add another 71 for Army Reserves and the National Guard. There were 42 more among Marines. Of 18 suicides at Ft. Campbell in Kentucky, seven were soldiers who never deployed.

So is the act Hasan’s is alleged to have committed the result of religious terrorism — violence fueled by a political motive — or the sheer desperation of a man who was about to be deployed in a war he didn’t agree with and tried to get out of fighting? Ames outlines several initial reports about the Ft. Hood Massacre that suggest the latter. Because Hasan was shot and injured mid-rampage, we don’t know whether he would have ended his own life as 140 other soldiers have done.

But is this shooting an anomaly, or more frequent and predictable than we’d like to admit? This is the fourth such attack at an Army base in 15 years, the third since 2003, and the second this year. (I’m not counting incidents such as the Fort Bragg wife murders.)

You may have missed the story of Sgt. John M. Russell who is accused of opening fire at a combat stress clinic Monday, killing five U.S. soldiers in May 2009.

Also recall the 1995 case of Sgt. William J. Kreutzer Jr. Kreutzer was sentenced to life imprisonment earlier this year after being found guilty again of murder and attempted murder in the 1995 shooting spree of 19 Soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division. Kreutzer, 38, was convicted and sentenced to death in 1996 for the crime which killed one officer and wounded 18 other Soldiers; but in March 2004, a three-judge panel set aside his sentence on appeal.

Remember that terrorist Timothy McVeigh served in the Army. He was a Gulf War veteran.

Perhaps by painting Hasan as a lone wolf — an exception rather than a potential Every Soldier — the Army is trying to sidestep its responsibility to make sure incidents like this don’t happen.

Homo sapiens is also Homo religiosus. As soon as we became recognizably human, men and women started to create religions. We are meaning-seeking creatures. While dogs, as far as we know, do not worry about the canine condition or agonize about their mortality, humans fall very easily into despair if we don’t find some significance in our lives. Theological ideas come and go, but the quest for meaning continues. So God isn’t going anywhere. And when we treat religion as something to be derided, dismissed, or destroyed, we risk amplifying its worst faults. Whether we like it or not, God is here to stay, and it’s time we found a way to live with him in a balanced, compassionate manner.

I disagree with a few of Armstrong’s points because they don’t align with my personal beliefs (atheist with strong non-deist Buddhist leanings). But I completely agree with Armstrong’s central point which is this: Religion is a given. God isn’t dead because we (collectively) won’t let him die.

Rather than trying to stamp out religion, particularly in countries where European-American secularism is seen as a form of cultural imperialism, Armstrong asks us to study religions and understand the intersections between faith and politics. As I wondered in a recent post, jihadism and Islamism may be best understood as a form of liberation theology, a religious response to a political condition.

It was the most successful form of colonialism: the colonized mind identified completely with the colonizer. The Javanese had held out for centuries, but finally they had lost. Their idea of there being many paths to God, none better than the other, had broken under the weight of the orthodox Arab injunction about the one true faith. The Javanese now skulked like criminals where their president had meditated just twenty years earlier.

Indonesian native Sadanand Dhume on the rise of an Arab-looking — rather than a localized, Indonesian-looking form of Islam — that has taken root in the country in the last 30 or so years. From this month’s Guernica piece, The Colonized Mind.

On a slightly related note: is it useful to think about jihadism and Islamism and the rhetoric from them as a form of global, anti-neo-colonialist liberation theology rather than a literal call to arms?

Also: Check out Irshad Manji’s book The Trouble with Islam Today: A Muslim’s Call for Reform in Her Faith. Read a bit about the Islamic tradition of ijtihad, and check out Marc Lynch’s Foreign Policy blog post Ft. Hood and the Clash of Civilizations: Security vs political correctness revisited.