Don't conflate Islam with terrorism

This is a great article. Many Americans seem to think of Islam as the enemy, as if all Muslims want to see the destruction of America. There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding out there. Yesterday on FOX News I saw coverage of a protest in which a protester held a sign that said "Muslims Danced With JOY on 9/11". Really? Hannity said that Feisal Abdul Rauf, the Imam who wants to build the Islamic center in Manhattan, advocates Sharia law in America. Is that really true? When I first heard about the proposed Islamic center in Manhattan I assumed the money would come from Wahhabi-infested KSA, but it turns out Feisal Abdul Rauf is a Sufi Muslim. The Wahhabis have not been kind to Sufis.

Feisal Abdul Rauf of the Cordoba Initiative is one of America’s leading thinkers of Sufism, the mystical form of Islam, which in terms of goals and outlook couldn’t be farther from the violent Wahhabism of the jihadists. His videos and sermons preach love, the remembrance of God (or “zikr”) and reconciliation. His slightly New Agey rhetoric makes him sound, for better or worse, like a Muslim Deepak Chopra. But in the eyes of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, he is an infidel-loving, grave-worshiping apostate; they no doubt regard him as a legitimate target for assassination.

As good as the article is, the author asserts: "Had the George W. Bush administration been more aware of the irreconcilable differences between the Salafist jihadists of Al Qaeda and the secular Baathists of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the United States might never have blundered into a disastrous war, and instead kept its focus on rebuilding post-Taliban Afghanistan while the hearts and minds of the Afghans were still open to persuasion."

It's a bit simplistic to call Saddamists "secular". Stalin was also secular. It's also a mistake to assume the differences between Saddamists and the jihadists of Al Qaeda were irreconcilable. There were Salafi ties to Iraq before 2003. I remember seeing video of Saddam and King Fahad embracing many years after Saddam's invasion of Kuwait. Obviously the differences between Saddam and the Wahhabis were not irreconcilable.

Back to the point: "While the West remains blind to the divisions and distinctions within Islam, the challenge posed by the Sufi vision of the faith is not lost on the extremists. This was shown most violently on July 2, when the Pakistani Taliban organized a double-suicide bombing of the Data Darbar, the largest Sufi shrine in Lahore, Pakistan’s second-largest city. The attack took place on a Thursday night, when the shrine was at its busiest; 42 people were killed and 175 were injured."