We Don’t Care What They Believe

Washington Post columnist William Raspberry asked Sunday, “Why do so many in the Muslim world – not just the terrorists but quite ordinary men and women – consider us their enemy?” He took an answer from one William O. Beeman, a “Middle East expert at Brown University,” Raspberry wrote, “Bin Laden, according to Beeman, is not so much an anti-American terrorist as a fierce defender of Islam determined to stop the United States from (in bin Laden’s words) ‘occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places’ – including Jerusalem.

Washington Post columnist William Raspberry asked Sunday, “Why do so many in the Muslim world – not just the terrorists but quite ordinary men and women – consider us their enemy?” He took an answer from one William O. Beeman, a “Middle East expert at Brown University,” Raspberry wrote, “Bin Laden, according to Beeman, is not so much an anti-American terrorist as a fierce defender of Islam determined to stop the United States from (in bin Laden’s words) ‘occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places’ – including Jerusalem. ‘Bin Laden will not cease his opposition until the United States leaves the region,’ Beeman wrote.”

Raspberry continued, “If that desire to have American (and other Western) interests completely out of the region is the reason behind the anti-American sentiment – and if, as seems likely, that means curtailing America’s support for Israel – then it’s hard to see how it can be appeased. But if that sentiment is widespread, and… the structure of the active terrorist organizations, including bin Laden’s, is highly ‘cellular,’ the threat to the United States could well survive bin Laden… The usual wartime responses are likely to render the cancer yet more aggressively malignant.”

We cite Raspberry, a normally thoughtful man, not to disparage him, but because he is representatives of many normally thoughtful people who wonder – not at all idly – why people hate us and why some hate us enough to massacre thousands of us at a time, why so many of them are in the Muslim world, and how we might make them like us better.

To even entertain the notion that American policy or American behavior is the cause of Tuesday’s bombing is abhorrent. They want us out of the region? So what? They want the rest of the Middle East to return to the 9th Century, like Afghanistan? So what? They want to destroy the Jewish and Christian significance of Jerusalem? So what? So we accommodate them or they fly airplanes into the World Trade Center?

We don’t care what they want. We care what they did. What they want, what they think and what they did puts them, not us, outside the pale of civilization.

Whatever legitimate points may be embedded in the Muslim search for modernization consistent with their religious principles, they are irrelevant to the war that states and entities in the Muslim world have unleashed on us and our friends.

When the Nazis spread their abhorrent rule over others, it was not the job of the Allies to reflect on why German people might have disliked the United States and how we might have upset Hitler. It was to stop them. Today is not the time to consider why some people don’t appreciate our system of government and economics. Raspberry asked of Muslim hatred for our system, “Is there anything at all reasonable for us to do about it?”

The answer is, “Yes. Stop them. Take away their ability to hurt us, level their places of refuge and put them out of business.”