Searching for America
A
terrorist wants you to be intolerant toward your own people
May 5, 2003
The Iranian
Sometimes we have these childhood memories, which may not even be
memories at all but vague recollections combined with our parents'
continuous storytelling of the event. I have a memory like that.
It was 1984, and I was three years old. As the story goes, we were
somewhere in Turkey, on our way to the American Embassy, walking
through a crowded bazaar. My mother looked away for a split second
and I was gone.
One thousand and one horrors swept across her imagination. She
was terrified that I was lost to her forever, any parents' worst nightmare. Thankfully, after a few hellish hours, she found
me at the police station. I think I remember the nice officer letting
me wear his hat. Maybe this is a stretch, but this is how I feel
about the place I call home, the United States of America. It is
lost in a crowded bazaar called the world, maybe I'll find it waiting
at the police station because I hope it is not lost forever.
It seems to me, when faced with close-minded, hate-filled people,
an enlightened society would deal with them by becoming more open-minded,
and more compassionate. Unfortunately, that does not seem to be
the case.
These days, being anti-war automatically enters you into the anti-American
category. Our society is giving into exactly what the terrorists
want. A terrorist wants you to hate him, because that justifies
his hate. He is happy to see you using violence, because that further
validates his use of violence. A terrorist wants you to be intolerant
toward your own people, the one's who do not share the same views
as you, because that makes his intolerance towards his people and
towards you defendable in his eyes.
I think that it's high time for us to do some house-cleaning. On
a personal level, we often learn more from being introspective than
casting all blame on an outside entity. For example, Islamic fundamentalists
who hold the West, and especially America responsible for all their
ills are not seeing the whole picture. Instead of being introspective
and having a personal jihad, they are turning outward and making
Islam look like a violent, intolerant and hateful religion. Instead
of working to build up their own countries from the inside, to bring
about real and long-lasting change, they are turning their energies
into a destructive movement.
America, as a nation, strives to meet the ideal of being the embodiment
of religious and cultural tolerance, the melting pot where everyone
has an opportunity and makes up a part of the whole. No where is
perfect but that is the ideal, and I think that the US has been
more successful at it than perhaps any other nation. We value and
preach tolerance, but our foreign policies support intolerant governments.
President Bush claims that, when it comes to terrorism, you are
either with us or against us, but who is "us"? Is it the
nation that provided the very same person we despise now, Saddam
Hussein, with the capabilities to produce chemical weapons to use
against the opponent in the Iran-Iraq war, killing thousands of
Iranians? Or perhaps, is "us" the country that currently
provides more monetary support to the state of Israel than any other
nation in the world? Ask a young Palestinian or a young Israeli
if they feel terrorized. We say "you are either with us or
against us" when it comes to terrorism, and yet we continue
to provide Israel with the weapons that only serve to keep themselves
and Palestinians in a vicious circle of terror.
If history has taught us anything, it would be that hate breeds
hate, and violence only begets more violence. The supposed "War
to end all Wars," WWII, did not turn out to be the last, nor
will our most current war be the last if we continue to deal with
conflicts with the same old mentality in which we have always dealt
with conflicts. History has continually tried to teach us that violence
is not a long-term solution, and we continually choose to ignore
that.
Plan A does not seemed to have worked very well for the last couple
of thousand years, so maybe we should think about devising a Plan
B.
I am all for God Blessing America, but I am also for God Blessing
Iraq, Pakistan, Cambodia, Malaysia, China, Greece and Bosnia. God
Bless all countries, all people around the world, because we are
not disconnected from them. Our actions have global impacts, and
our thoughts about one another, whether negative or positive, will
come into fruition, this is what we call social consciousness.
Being anti-war does not mean you are anti-American or that you
don't pray every night for the thousands of troops, American or
otherwise, all over the world. Being anti-war, for me, just means
that if war has continued to happen throughout the centuries, then
there is an underlying problem in society that must be dealt with
if we are ever to elevate ourselves as a world community.
As long as we continue to cut off the branches, thinking that the
tree will die, we will continue to experience violence all over
the world. If we continue creating destructive and intolerable environments
in which groups of people continue to be degraded and weakened emotionally,
intellectually, and economically, we only lay the foundation for
hate, anger, and terrorist activity. Because after all, terrorism
is traditionally used by the weak against the strong, and when you
get to the point when your life is so horrible that you are willing
to blow yourself up, that is a problem that affects the entire world,
weak and strong alike.
Maybe I am an idealist, but I am not a pacifist asserting that
we should do nothing to protect ourselves against terrorists. I
am just saying that we should start treating the disease instead
of the symptom. We should take a step back and try to understand
why these things are happening and attempt to change them from the
source.
So, I'm just going to wander around police stations, looking for
us. The "us" that gives millions of dollars in humanitarian
aid every year to people in need, more than all other countries
combined, the "us" that has given me, as an Iranian immigrant,
and now a naturalized citizen, the freedom to speak out and agree
or disagree with our foreign policies, not the "us" that
supports the killing of the innocent, and inadvertently, the creation
of more terrorists.
May is...
Mamnoon Iranian.com Month
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