Cognitive Dissonance (continued)

June 25th, 2004 by Administrator

Had a long commute this afternoon which gave me time to continue pondering the past few posts. Maybe it’s the hypnotic beat of the trance-techno I listen to, or perhaps it’s the concentration on the road that allows my subconscious to play with ideas - smashing them into one another until eventually something new - or at least new for me emerges.

How do we force a reformation on Islam?
The answer is of course, we can’t. Such a profound change can only occur from within Islam itself. But we can help it along.

Most of interfaith dialog has been along the lines of assuring Muslims that we aren’t fighting their religion. The trouble is that we are. We are on a crusade - but it’s not to destroy Islam: it’s to make it learn to thrive among other religions. In short, we need Islam to learn how to “play nice with others”.

Currently it can’t. On a deeply spiritual level, Islam is in competition with the other world’s religions and has been since it’s inception 1400 years ago. Contemporary Muslims today in America or Europe hold two conflicting beliefs at the same time: First, the belief that non-Muslims are worthy of the same right to life as Muslims. Second, the belief that non-Muslims are dhimmis or less than Muslims as taught in portions of the Koran.

The key to reformation of Islam lays with these Muslims living outside of the Islamic world - yet they have been relatively silent on terrorist acts as they suffer from the same spiritual blindness as those living in the Islamic world. How do we convince them?

First, I believe that we have to force the issue of responsibility on them at the same time that we protect their rights. Americans of all faiths must stand up against intolerance towards Muslims, but at the same time they must demand that Muslims work against intolerance within Islam.

Secondly, American muslims must tell their brethren in the Islamic world that they do not live as second class citizens in the West. They also must put an end to the vile anti-Semitic and anti-American propaganda that passes for Wahabi funded Islamic newspapers in the West.

Third, we need to become more aware of the Arabic-speaking press both within the US and the Arab-world. The group MEMRI regularly covers the Arab world press, but members of the media such as CNN, the Los Angeles Times, and other news outlets should hire Arabic and Farsi translators to report what is happening in the press in the Islamic world. We cannot rely upon the English media there because these outlets water down or fail to report stories that would cast Islam in a negative light.

And light is the key. We have to understand our enemy, and the best way of doing this is to examine the world he lives in critically and as objectively as possible. We have to drag him into the shadows and expose him for what he is - a psychopath that is attempting to hijack one of the world’s great religions.

Can this be done?

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